IN MEXICO, REPORTERS LEARN NOT TO NAME NAMES

The Drug Business Has Become So Deadly That Those Covering It Risk Their Lives.

MEXICO CITY -- The writer was one of the legion of underpaid beat
reporters in Mexico, the kind who churn out four or five stories a
day, for low pay and little recognition. They know all about the
corrupt and violent dealings going on around them, even though they
can't always pass on this knowledge to their readers.

He was going to brief me on the local situation, which involved some
high-profile killings, various bands of criminals with colorful
nicknames and the transport of large quantities of cocaine and
marijuana into the United States.

But when I walked into his office, the reporter looked upset. He bit
his lower lip and glanced down at the floor, seemingly trying to fight
off tears. "I'm quitting," he said.

"What?" I said. "Why?"

In the 2 1/2 years I've been covering the so-called drug wars in
Mexico and Central America, I've traveled to small-town police
stations, government ministries and newsrooms where journalists
require military protection.

Along the way, I've met many courageous people, and many people whose
proximity to the drug traffickers' machinery of death has frightened
them into silence. This reporter, the lone staffer in his bureau, was
a little bit of both. I cannot mention his name, or the town he works
in.

After announcing his resignation, he was silent for a
time.

"Is there anything I can do to help you?" I asked. He shook his head.
We sat like this for a few minutes, until he finally stood up and
directed me to his desk.

He pointed to his computer screen and the window of an
instant-messaging program, where a flashing missive declared: "You are
bothering a lot of people."

It was a death threat: In the local idiom, to be told you are
"bothering" someone is an unambiguous warning.

"They've been following me," he said. An hour and half a pack of
cigarettes later, he had told me about a car with no license plates
that appeared wherever he did, cruising slowly.

"But that's not the reason I'm quitting," he said. It was the low pay
and the unfulfilled promises from his bosses (including a company car)
that really had him angry. There was something wrong about having to
take a bus to cover stories that could get you killed, he said. The
threats were just the final straw.

In the end, the reporter stayed on his beat a bit longer and was
transferred to a safer place, where he didn't have to cover so many
funerals and drug busts -- and where he wouldn't "bother" people who
didn't want to be bothered.

That's how it goes when you write about the drug trade: You get close
to the story, and then you step away.

"I don't want to know any names," one prominent Mexico City drug
expert told me over coffee one day, explaining how he had managed to
write about organized crime for years without "bothering" anyone.
"When people in the government offer to show me confidential reports,
I say, 'Please, don't! I don't want to see them!' "

The expert writes about the drug war's "big picture," and thus avoids
the most dangerous thing a writer can do here: reveal a name or a fact
that directly affects a trafficker's operations.

The violence tied to the drug-trafficking business has grown more
cruel and irrational as the mad scramble for easy money has grown more
mad.

In recent years, the attacks have progressed from ambushes with
automatic weapons to grenade assaults and grotesque beheadings. When a
ton of cocaine falls from the sky, people barely take notice.

In March, police found 2 tons of $100 bills (more than $205 million)
in a mansion four blocks from my house here. I've often walked past
that now-abandoned house, fantasizing about discovering dollar bills
floating in the nearby gutters like so much trash.

Not long ago, my aunt returned to her home in Guatemala City to
discover her humble colonia sealed off with police tape. One of her
neighbors, a small-time drug dealer, had been shot to death in his
doorway. He had been extorting money from the local grocers and was
friends with a police officer. All the neighbors knew this, but could
do nothing.

My mother lives in Guatemala City too. Less than a mile from her home
in the city center, one neighborhood is so infested with drug gangs
that the army has set up a base, complete with sandbag parapets, in
the local market.

And it was in Guatemala City in November that I came face to face with
the drug dead, a body that had been wrapped up in plastic and dumped
onto the street from an overpass.

I don't know who the victim was. The Guatemalan news media were too
busy covering a presidential election that night (as was I), and the
killing wasn't reported in the newspapers.

Nearly all of the drug-related crimes The Times reported on in the
region last year remain unsolved, including the killing of several
Mexican musicians and the slaying in Guatemala of three Salvadoran
legislators.

The Guatemalan police officers arrested in the legislators' killings
- -- anti-narcotics officers said to be in the hire of drug traffickers
- -- were themselves killed a few days later in their jail cells. The
masterminds of these crimes remain free.

When I traveled to Guatemala to write about the killings, I met
several people with theories as to who might be responsible. I learned
the names of families and businesses believed linked to the
transshipment of drugs. Officials have leaked this information to
local journalists, but no one will publish it.

"It's too dangerous," a journalist said. "There's no one here to
protect us. And if we're killed, no one will be prosecuted."

Knowing that the piece of unverified information I'd been given could
get someone killed, I wondered whether I should even write it down in
my notebook.