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Nieman’s 80th Anniversary Reunion Weekend

Transcript: Marcela Turati

Marcela Turati:  …a reporter told me how, one night, he got a call to tell him that a commander squad had taken his colleague. He got up from the bed, got dressed, said goodbye to his wife, kissed his children, and sat down in the living room waiting to be taken away. It was the longest night of his life.

“Why didn’t you run?” I asked, surprised.

“Where could I run?” he said. “My only wish was to stop them entering my house and taking me in front of my family. I didn’t want my family to remember me with that image.” He survived, but his friend was found the next day. His body discarded in the street like trash.

Another day, a colleague went to see what help she could give to a fellow reporter who was in danger. He said, “Bring me a gun.”

“A gun?” She was stupefied.

“Yes,” he said. “It is not to kill them. It’s to kill myself if they come for me because, now, they don’t just kill us, journalists. They torture us as well.”

Whenever I recall these stories, I think of the many journalists who have felt the same solitude on such a night, not knowing who to call, who to ask for help, not trusting in authorities, resigned to the fact that death is an occupational hazard.

In my country, more than 120 journalists have been murdered or disappeared in the last twelve years. Mexican journalists don’t die in crossfire or from landmines like they would in a traditional war.

In Mexico, journalists are being hunted. The killers gun down journalists in their homes, snipe them as they leave their newsroom or blow them away on the street. Nobody is paying for these crimes.

I have to testify the killing of journalists who I know. Some of them were my friends — Armando Rodriguez in Ciudad Juarez in 2010; Regina Martinez, a correspondent in Veracruz for my own magazine in 2012; Rubén Espinosa two years later, photographer for my magazine. Last year, Miroslava Breach, the most important investigative journalist in my hometown.

One day before our Neiman class graduation, Javier Valdez was killed in 2017. He was from Sinaloa, land of drug cartels. Once, when I had to give a speech in front of American journalists, he told me, “Please tell the people don’t abandon us.” I still hear him saying that.

In today’s Mexico, doing journalism is like walking blindfolded on quicksand. It is hard to know where the danger lies. In some areas, government officials are part of the organized crime. When you interview them, you don’t know who you are talking to.

Corruption and impunity is a signature of this tragedy. It has changed our lives, left marks on many of us. I was a normal journalist covering poverty issues. In 2008, when the drug war was declared in my country, I started covering murders, massacres, forced disappearances, the displacement of entire communities, the grief of orphans and widows.

Once, I went to a workshop with families of victims. Thirty mothers formed a line to show me photos of their children and tell me how they had disappeared. They pleaded with me not to get tired before they could tell me their story.

“Don’t get tired of us speaking about us,” they told me at the end, and I began to cry. Another time, covering the exhumation of a mass grave with two hundred bodies, a woman yelledl at me, “Why are you, journalists, only coming now? We have been denouncing the killings, and no one paid us attention. We were speaking from beneath the sea.”

“From beneath the sea” — that phrase is still inside me. I felt the sense of urgency. With other colleagues, we found ways to support journalists at risk to create networks among reporters in dangerous and silent places to help those who have to flee and to protest against each killing and ask for justice.

One day, I received threats for participating in an investigation about the kidnapping and murder of our colleague, Goyo Jiménez, but I, as many other journalists, continued this battle against silence.

Anyone who has witnessed such horror, who has been touched by such pain, who meets the survivors that rise through the ashes is never again a soul at peace. The memory never stops prickling. You cannot erase the experience. You cannot give up.

Over time, I became trapped in a dark circle. Some days were good; I started a school for journalists in my home. Others were bad; I was isolated in my house. One day, I stopped writing. I found it difficult to read or answer emails. It was impossible to finish projects.

I have a phobia of giving interviews. Speaking in public, I cried. I felt guilty with the people who trusted in me and shared with me their stories because I couldn’t brought it. I felt lonely, disconnected. All these were known trauma symptoms.

I just felt as burned from the inside as if I touched a high-voltage wire. When I was trying to reconnect with myself and the photographer, Rubén Espinosa, who had asked me for help a few weeks ago, was killed in Mexico City.

In the cemetery, when we were burying him, inside me, I said, “I want to live. I don’t want another funeral.” Time after that, I applied to the Neiman fellowship as a choice for life. It allowed me to step out of the environment of constant urgency and death and helped me to become a more confident and effective person and change agent in Mexican journalism.

When I returned to Mexico, I continued doing journalism and organizing workshops for other journalists about how to approach the victims and how to deal with our own pain.

In the sessions, we share our guilty feelings, our fears, nightmares, the sadness, the disconnection with our families and how some survived the torture, the attacks in their newsroom or the murder of friends and how we continue doing journalism.

We talked about treatments for healing, how to protect ourselves and, sometimes, about the importance of praying. That might not be a journalistic approach, I know, but when you are going frequently to mass graves — some of us don’t — your answers must be in another dimension.

During the workshops, always, when journalists ask me, “Am I still a journalist if I cry?” I say, “Who will not cry covering a massacre of seventy-two migrants, or the discovery of trailers full of dead bodies, or every time you interview parents who feel dead inside because their children have been killed in a brutal way or have disappeared?”

People often ask me why I keep doing this work, why I choose it. The truth is I don’t know. I didn’t choose to cover a war crime to my country. I became a war correspondent without knowing it. Many of us did. What I do know is that whatever silence takes fruit, death and suffering follow.

We need to go on reporting. Yes, we cry a lot in the workshops as we cry in life but, every time, I listen to my fellow journalists saying that our work is worthy. We gather to organize ourselves so we don’t do it alone and unprotected.

I feel like it is a love declaration for the profession and for life. We always find reasons for hope and celebrate. When people ask me “why me?” and my colleagues continue doing these things if it’s not safe, I always remember one journalist that one day came to us and said, “Thanks to you, I am still alive because I was kidnapped when Goyo had disappeared. My destiny was to be killed, but I heard my kidnappers deciding to release me because they didn’t want the same scandal that you were making for Goyo.”

Defending freedom of the speech is a fight for life no matter where you live. As the great Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuściński, once said, “In the struggle against silence, human life is at a stake.”

Thank you.