VIOLENCE CREATES CULTURE OF SILENCE IN MEXICAN CITY

Police, Residents Filled With Fear Amid Drug Wars

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico - Here, it's better not to know.
Information can be poison in this border city. Hard-boiled police reporters
would rather you didn't tell them the names of certain criminals. When there's
a shoot-out downtown, even the most ambitious radio reporter will not
necessarily rush to the scene.

So it went the day last month that four undercover federal police
officers were ambushed and killed in thick lunch-hour traffic on the
city's busiest street. The offices of several newspapers and radio
stations were just blocks away -- but the news broke 700 miles to the
south, on the Mexico City wire services. "I don't mention groups, I
don't mention names . . . . I don't want to know anything," said
Leonardo Herrada Garcia, a newspaper editor here who is president of
the Association of Journalists of Nuevo Laredo. His paper will publish
only the barest facts of the crime wave sweeping the city. "It's not
fear, it's being prudent," he explained. Three journalists have been
killed here in the last year. "We're not going to try to be the hero
of the movie."

The war between the so-called Gulf and Sinaloa cartels has been blamed
by Mexican federal officials for about 230 deaths in the past 15
months. The journalists who ordinarily would report on such violence
have been silenced by cartel operatives who kidnap reporters and
repeatedly phone in threats to newsrooms. Violence and intimidation
have created a culture of silence in this city of 500,000 people.
Municipal officials rarely comment publicly on the killings. Law
enforcement authorities seem powerless. And people here are
hard-pressed to remember the last time anyone was arrested or
prosecuted for such sensational crimes as the killing of more than a
dozen police officers. "When a crime is committed, there should be an
investigation, an accused, a punishment," said Carlos Galvan, who owns
two newspapers. "As long as those things don't happen, speculation
eats up [the reputation of] the victim." Indeed, rumor and mythology
are filling the information vacuum in Nuevo Laredo. Ask why so many
people have died here, and there's a good chance you'll be told that
the dead have only themselves to blame. The "vox populi" has it that
no "good" or "innocent" person is ever killed in Nuevo Laredo.
"They must have been involved in something," a taxi driver said just
a block from the site where the four police officers were killed. The
refrain is reminiscent of dictatorships in other Latin American
nations, such as Argentina, where for years people were taken away by
soldiers and police officers and "disappeared" without
explanation.

Told that the dead were police officers, the taxi driver responded,
"The police are all corrupt."

Another popular saying draws on the Mexican myth that killers are
fated to forever drag around the remains of their victims: "Only the
person who carries the sack of bones knows why they were killed,"
people say. Newspaper and radio reporters say they would like to tell
the full story of the killings. The names of certain drug kingpins
circulate among journalists and in other border towns, but have never
been printed. Facts might help dispel the myths, they say, as well as
the aura of omnipotence that surrounds the cartels. But facts can get
reporters killed.

"Some fortunate people who have not been touched directly by the
violence can give themselves the luxury of thinking that honest people
are not affected," said one journalist who, like many other people
interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of not being named.
"That's not true." The cartels are a shadowy but ubiquitous presence.
Longtime residents fear their wealth, their armaments, and their
apparent infiltration of institutions, such as the police force.

The pictures of the dead run in the local newspapers alongside
screaming headlines such as "A Rain of Bullets!" Some papers
routinely run stark pictures of open-eyed corpses torn up by
high-caliber bullets. But rarely will a local newspaper, or a local
official, explain why a person was killed or who the killer might be.

Are all the dead drug dealers, or connected with them, as many say?
When a police officer is killed, is it in retaliation for a police
raid, or because the officer was mixed up with criminals?

When a journalist is killed or attacked, is it because he or she
"offended the sensibilities" (a common Nuevo Laredo euphemism) of one
of the drug bands by revealing something about its operations? Or was
it because the journalist was working for a cartel and was killed by
its rival? Last year, Tamaulipas Governor Eugenio Hernandez Flores
told residents: "The people of Tamaulipas who behave themselves have
nothing to fear," because those being victimized in the wave of
violence "are in some way involved with organized crime."

Even people who were close to the victims wonder whether they can ever
know why their friends and relatives were killed.

A Nuevo Laredo resident who described himself as a childhood friend of
Alejandro Dominguez, a police chief assassinated last year, wonders
what his friend might have done to get himself killed.

"You have to go to the root of things. Why did it happen?" said the
man, a Nuevo Laredo entrepreneur who asked not to be named. "What did
he have in his past? What was his way of living before?"

Dominguez had worked in the attorney general's office. "He was in law
enforcement," the friend said. "And when you're in that job, whether
you like it or not, you have to get involved with bad people." The
assassination of Dominguez shook Nuevo Laredo and garnered
international headlines. He had been head of the Nuevo Laredo police
force for just a few hours when he was gunned down.