Journalist on the run
The vast majority of Mexicans who apply for refugee status in Canada are rejected. Luis Horacio Najera is an exception. He spent years as an investigative reporter in the badlands along the Mexico-U.S. border, writing stories on the drug trade and corruption. Then one day he learned his name was on a death list. Claude Adams takes up the story.
On a
fall evening, after dark, you might find Luis Horacio Najera in Vancouver’s
Downtown Eastside, peering down the desolate alleyways with a small Canon
digital camera in his hand. He’s wearing a red ski jacket, and he’s uncommonly
alert, a trained observer.
He
might be photographing a surreptitious drug deal, or a junkie asleep by a
dumpster. Luis will occasionally overhear snatches of conversation in
Spanish. And that will tell him something significant. “There are Latins
dealing in drugs up here,” he’ll say. He means Mexicans. He means gangs. And he
should know.
Because for nearly half his life, Luis, 40, whose friends know him as
Horacio, was a journalist in one of the most dangerous places in the Western
Hemisphere—the Mexican-U.S. borderlands. His job was reporting on organized
crime, illegal immigration, arms trafficking and police corruption. The good
guys and the bad guys knew his name and his work, even though his employers,
the Grupo Reforma, a prominent publishing house, kept his name off his stories.
His exposes were bylined simply “Staff Reporter.”
That anonymity is no protection at all in Mexico. Since 2006, 34
journalists and media workers have been assassinated in Mexico. In Chihuahua
province alone, where Luis plied his trade, the death toll was more than a half
dozen. And it isn’t just the hit men of the drug cartels you have to worry
about; the police and the federales also
operate on the dark side. Reporters with zeal and integrity walk a very fine
line.
Luis stepped over that line once too often. In August 2008, he wrote a
story about a massacre at a Ciudad Juarez drug rehab centre. “I wrote that
these places were hideouts for gangsters. I knew why the massacre happened. The
military and the state police were involved. That’s when the military and the
gangs converged against me. I was caught between two fires.” (See Luis’ video Silencio o muerte, “Silence or Death.”)
Media organizations in Mexico do little or nothing to safeguard their
employees, Luis says. In fact, reporters are all required to sign waivers that relieve
their newspapers of any liability if they are injured or killed. For
specialists like Luis, who work the crime beat, that’s a heavy psychological
burden.
A
reliable source told Luis that his name was on a death list, marked for
assassination. As he would later write: “I could not trust the government, and
I could not simply let myself be killed under some lonely streetlight.” So a
month later, Luis, his wife and their three children slipped across the border
carrying three suitcases, and came to Canada. They applied for refugee status.
Luis
worried that his flight might be seen as an act of cowardice. But he was
vindicated two months later when another journalist on the list, Armando
Rodriguez Carreon, was gunned down outside his home.
Today, Luis and his family live in a
small rented home in North Delta. After 14 months without a job, he found work
as a janitor. He cleans floors and toilets. It pays $900 a month. The rent is
$1100. They survive with the help of friends and the Mormon Church, where they
worship. Some of their clothes and furniture “came right out of the garbage.”
Luis’ shoes are soaked from the rain when we meet for coffee at Tim
Horton’s. “One thing about Canada,” he remarks, “is that the rain comes
sideways, not straight down.” I
wait for the grin, a sign that’s he’s joking. He’s not. I notice that his shoes
are also flecked with paint (from a recent contracting job.) He says he spent a
week selling video cameras at Futureshop, another week as a glazier’s assistant.
But the janitor’s work is the most reliable. “It’s the refugee’s life,” he
shrugs.
Later this month, Luis will be in Toronto to be recognized as one of the
2010 International Press Freedom Award winners. He hopes the exposure will help
him find a better job, something in the academic world maybe. “I could do
research in public safety, or intelligence.” Meanwhile, he’s studying English
to improve his employability.
Luis knows that, for all the melodrama in his life, he’s lucky to be
here. Fewer than 10% of Mexicans who apply for refugee status in Canada are
accepted. It is, after all, a democracy with stable institutions. If you feel
threatened in one province, you can move to another where it’s safer. And
despite the occasional eruptions of drug cartel violence in the north, Mexico
is still seen as a cheap and safe vacation spot for Canadians.
But one man’s paradise is another man’s purgatory. Luis spent 18 months
preparing his case for the Refugee Board, and he didn’t leave anything to
chance. He had letters of support from Reporters without Borders, the Committee
to Protect Journalists, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, Article 19
from the UK, and even a publishing group in Germany. They all vouched for the
fact that he was likely a marked man if he remained in Mexico.
“The smartest choice we made in Canada,” says Luis, “was to buy a
printer from Futureship. My file was more than 900 pages of evidence.”
In that file, he covered his years of work as an investigative journalist
in Ciudad Juarez, West Texas and New Mexico. He told of how he was threatened
with death many times, how he was followed and harassed and intimidated. Once,
a van parked outside his home and as his wife passed by, a thug in the van
formed his fist into the shape of a gun and pretended to shoot her.
The most terrifying incident of all
involved a fellow journalist, Enrique Perea Quintanilla in August 2006. Perea
lived in another city, and the two men texted regularly, exchanging information
about the stories they were following. One day, Luis sent a text message to
Perea at 2pm, and a few minutes later, he received an innocuous message in
reply. What Luis didn’t know then, was that Perea had been abducted by a gang,
and that the gangsters were intercepting his text messages, and replying to
them. Perea was killed shortly after. A source later told him that the killers
were trying to make Luis a “scapegoat” for the killing, on the basis of the
text messages.
The refugee board hearing in downtown Vancouver this past summer started
at 9 a.m. and lasted barely an hour. By 11:30, Luis had a decision: His
application was accepted.
Today, Luis still has all the instincts and mannerisms of a journalist.
Apart from his exploratory forays in the Downtown Eastside, he’s also an
inveterate shutterbug. He takes pictures of everything with his pocket Canon.
He’s especially proud of his 19-year-old son who marched on a recent
Remembrance Day parade as a member of the Boy Scouts. He shows me a dozen snapshots.
“When I die, I
want my grandsons and my great-grandsons to know why they are born in Canada, and how they came to be here,” he
says. “I want that to be my legacy.”
Does he feel secure now in Canada?
Luis thinks a minute and then replies in his unpolished English: “It may
sound paranoid, but I know that for drug dealers, revenge is a plate you can
enjoy cold.”
It’s a reminder that after two years, Luis Najera still carries the past
with him. And he still keeps a wary eye over his shoulder. In that sense, he remains a journalist on the run.
(In August, The Globe and Mail published an opinion piece by Luis Najera on the justice system in Mexico.)
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