Fleeing the black hole called Tamaulipas

Translated by El Profe for Borderland Beat from Horizontal

I survived three kidnappings and one week of torture. Forty companions and acquaintances disappeared. The State and Los Zetas threatened me. I fled from my house, but they will not shut me up. I am a journalist who defends those who have been silenced for reporting.

                        

  

by Gildo Garza

After surviving three "levantones" of Los Zetas and endured a week of unimaginable tortures, I could not write anymore.
 
After thinking for hours that they were going to kill me - to "see the devil's eyes" as they say in Tamaulipas - or after observing my companion's broken body, I could have kept quiet.
 
When between 2000 and 2013 more than 40 comrades and acquaintances disappeared and others were murdered and the state humiliated them by planting drugs and cardboard with messages from the narco at the crime scene to accuse them, I could have surrendered.
 
After all this, I ran away from my house.
 
But from the day I arrived at that workshop at the newspaper La Voz de Tamaulipas, of the late José Luis Contreras, and put a bucket, solution, and a printing plate in my hands, I knew that I had been caught by journalism. I felt the obligation to educate and document the history of Tamaulipas. That's why I'm still recounting.


For example, in its majority, it was the State. It was the agents of the Ministerial Police who, under the orders of some politician or criminal, silenced my companions.
 
In 2006, when Felipe Calderón deployed the first hordes of soldiers to Tamaulipas, cities such as Reynosa, Nuevo Laredo, Ciudad Victoria, and the metropolitan areas, they collapsed in bloody shootings. Entire families were exterminated and others more impaled alive to demonstrate the power and terror that Los Zetas and the Gulf Cartel would rule with for about 7 years.
 
Journalists, without being criminals, were made to be halcones. We were co-opted by criminal groups and often forced to portray the faces of their enemies at the last second before they were killed. Those who did not obey were tortured, sometimes to death, as in February 2008: The Zetas forced the journalist of El Expreso, José Luis Villanueva Berrones, to hang himself.
 
And so one by one they were falling. Some 13 years later they are officially disappeared because their bodies were never found. Others were left in sewers or burned alive. The criminals told us not to ask. Not for Miguel Ángel Domínguez, nor Pedro Argüello, nor David Silva, nor José Navarro Valdez, nor my former boss Guillermo Martínez Alvarado, with whom I spoke three days before his execution:
   
-Flaco, take the shot, this got hot. They put us up against a wall and told us that if we worked for the Gulf or the Zetas they would kill us.

That was the last thing I talked to him about.
 
The next day a message arrived to my Nextel:
 
-Go see the chicharrones of your companions, the cons, where you will go if you don't obey, you goddamn reporter shits-.

Four companions had been burned in front of the Specialties Hospital in Ciudad Victoria. They were from Reynosa. International organizations continue to report them as missing.
 
The death of a journalist in Tamaulipas is justified. The government does it with words like chayotero or narcoreportero. Society politicizes the issue and is responsible for destroying the image, the career, and the dignity of the family. Your own colleagues give you up or criminalize you: "He was bad, he talked to them, they paid him ...".
 
In that black hole called Tamaulipas, since 2006 a "Manual to Kill Journalists" has been created. It has worked perfectly because there is not a single case that has been prosecuted.
 
In 2009, I published several cases of corruption in the public administration of the municipality of El Mante, Tamaulipas. The then mayor, Héctor López González, sent some men to beat me up. When I denounced him to my employer, Adalberto Garza Dragustinovis, he told me: "That's what you are for, to receive the chingazos."
 
Doing journalism in Tamaulipas is a suicidal job offering little chance of getting old. The value of a journalist lies in its participation to build the truth above all, but in my state we are seen as enemies of the State and criminal groups. That's why my companions and friends were silenced by bullets.
 
In 2013 it was my turn to recognize my friend in the morgue. It was my partner and teacher, Mario Ricardo Chávez Jorge, who in June of that year was mutilated from the heels and a bullet was put into his head. We were killed when we had just become independent after years of work from media and bosses that only used us and silenced hundreds of news items. The Special Prosecutor's Office for the Attention of Crimes committed against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) said: "We are still investigating." Nothing else
 
With him I walked immensely long distances to do an interview because we did not have any other transport than our feet and we had to ask for change to put together for tortillas. We shared a vision and a mission, but the family blamed us.
 
After his murder and the hunting from Egidio Torre Cantú's state government, I did not stop either. I recommitted myself to my newspaper, now called Cambio, and denounced corruption, diversion of resources, nepotism, and the misery inherited to the Tamaulipas people from a political alternation that has not changed my beautiful state.
 
On June 6, 2017, hidden enemies carried out a smear campaign where they accused me of offending a person who sold himself as an activist for the release of some inmates in Ciudad Victoria prison and turned out to be a criminal.  

They made two facebook pages: "Denisse Lady Penal" and "Corrupt Journalists of Tamaulipas" where they talked about my supposed attack and another where they denigrated my labor and my journalistic work, all with paid publicity.
 
On June 8, they killed "Denisse Lady Penal" , the woman I supposedly threatened and offended. It was a media scandal. Many blamed me and attacked me through social networks. According to the FEADLE, the aggression came from the State. But ... [are you going to bite the hand that feeds you?] The messages were signed by Los Zetas.

They destroyed my life.
 
I did not want to stay to investigate what would happen after this message:
 
-You have a few hours to leave Tamaulipas, if not we will kill your family and even your dog ... -
 
And so once again the "Manual to Kill Journalists" in Tamaulipas worked, from which I have documented each case from 2000 to date.
 
Now I am a forced displaced inmate, but I am still a journalist -one who fled from hell with the task of speaking for all those who died because of the commitment to inform- and I was also reborn as a defender of human rights. I have become a journalist who defends journalists. And as long as I have life they will never shut me up.