Mexico Bureau Chief Discusses Border Violence

The Rogers Memorial Library offered patrons a rare insight into what it is like to report from the U.S.-Mexico border during a talk last week with renowned journalist Alfredo Corchado.

Corchado is the Mexico bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News and a 2009 Harvard Nieman Fellow. He also won the Elijah Parish Livejoy Award in 2010 for courageous journalism.

He has been covering the border and drug violence since 2003. Corchado said how tacit agreements between government and organized crime have allowed criminal activity to thrive in Mexico by cultivating a lawless atmosphere that is responsible for the deaths of honest police, civilians and journalists.

He said the government is now trying to crack down, but faces challenges after being complicit for so long.

Since December 2006, nearly 40,000 people have died in Mexico, Corchado said. In the city of Juárez — “the most violent city in Mexico” — there were 3,111 murders in a year, he said. “Juárez had more killings than the entire country of Afghanistan.”

Drug cartels try to control the media through intimidation and violence, Corchado said. “[Juárez] is such a giant city that I think it’s harder for the cartels to control the media,” he added.

But Corchado assured that the violence stays south of the border. “The U.S. side of the border has never been as safe as it is today,” he said. “The big spillover to the United States isn’t really the violence; it’s the exodus of Mexico’s middle class and upper class.”

And while he once felt that being a U.S. citizen made him safe, he said, “I don’t think that’s the case anymore,” citing a February incident when two U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were shot, one fatally.

Corchado is a native of Mexico but immigrated to the United States at the age of 6 in 1966 and became a U.S. citizen on Black Monday in 1987. His family first settled in central California, where they became migrant workers.

He got his first exposure to journalism when he was 13; while he was working in the fields, a television crew interviewed him because the law required he be at least 15. He said it left an impression because the journalists were interested in giving him a voice.

He attended school, but his high school education stopped at 15. “Like many Latino kids at that time, I decided to drop out of school,” he said. He was dating the daughter of a rancher at the time, he said, and he planned to marry her and eventually take over the ranch.

His mother wasn’t keen on the idea, and she bribed him with a car and the opportunity to take out on his own. He chose to move to El Paso, Texas, and his family soon followed and opened a restaurant, Freddy’s, named for him.

At University of Texas at El Paso, he joined the student newspaper. “At the time, Mexico was changing,” he said. “Right across the border, there were all these marches for democracy.”

But to get his parents’ blessing to pursue a career in journalism, he had to promise his father he would not cover organized crime, he said. Corchado recalled his father telling him, “They don’t understand the word forgiveness.”

In fact, Corchado said his father was once asked by drug runners to allow the family restaurant to be used for money laundering, and he was warned that if he agreed and then turned in the criminals to police, they wouldn’t come after him, but instead come after his children.

“I became a Neiman fellow because I became scared of covering the drug war,” Corchado admitted. “I was gone for a year and during the year you really remove yourself.”

He didn’t stay detached for long. In January 2010, he got a call that students having a party in a house tagged with gang symbols were massacred by a rival gang — even though the students were not affiliated with any gang. Thirty-six were shot, 16 fatally.