Gregory Gransden – on Mexico’s crime reporters.

Mexico City
October 2, 2000

Dear Paul,

I’m standing around the other night with Mateo, a crime reporter for a local Mexico City tabloid, and he’s telling me about this guy who committed suicide on the same day as my birthday, August 27th.

The guy had just discovered he was HIV positive. He chose an overpass on the Mexico-Toluca highway, and the police arrived and tried to talk him down. His mother was on the scene, too, and Mateo’s doing an impression of her calling out to her son in a comic high-pitched voice: “Rigoberto! Rigoberto! Your sister is here! Come down and see your sister!”

We all laugh, if a bit uneasily, and then I turn on my video camera and ask Mateo if he could repeat the joke for the documentary I’m shooting. He suddenly looks contrite, and gives a little speech about how no one should make fun of dead people, and how one should feel compassion for the suffering of others – because in this job, one sees an awful lot of suffering humanity. I turn off the camera.

It’s just after midnight, and I’m hanging out with the local crime reporters at the Angel of Independence monument on Avenida Reforma. They have gathered here, as they do every night at midnight, to wait for news to break – car accidents mostly, but also police raids, murders, hijackings, building collapses, fires, riots, blockades, gas main explosions, shoot-outs, gang executions, bombs, earth tremors.

Most of them have police-band radios and walkie-talkies, which they use to communicate with dispatchers at Radio Red, a local news radio station. The radio reporters have cell phones so they can file their stories on the spot. If something happens that’s worth covering – which depends on how many casualties it produces, how far away it is, and whether they reckon they can get there before the police clear away the wreck or haul away the bodies – everyone piles into an assortment of clapped-out VW Beetles and Nissans and rushes to the scene.

There’s a hot-dog stand nearby, and a long bench where some of the guys are resting their legs. A couple of others are taking a nap in one of the cars. The rest are standing around in a little group, chatting and telling stories. In theory, they all work for competing media; but they help each other out, sharing notes and giving rides to colleagues without cars. I’ve always thought of Mexico City at night as rather frightening, but I feel at ease hanging out here, in the heart of the city’s financial district, in the dead of night.

The night-shift reporters are all pretty young. Most are in their 20s and 30s, and they seem addicted to the adrenaline of the job, which is in fact quite dangerous – apart from the obvious risks of driving around the city at high speed in rattling old cars, they sometimes get attacked by angry mobs at crime scenes, especially in some of the bad neighborhoods, like Tepito or Colonia Buenos Aires. They’ll walk into burning buildings to try to scoop the competition, and have to be rescued by firefighters.

Word of a car accident comes over the police band. It’s a relatively minor one, no fatalities, and normally we would ignore it, but the driver of one of the vehicles is the nineteen-year-old son of a Mexican pop star, which means it’s news. We set off at high speed in the direction of Polanco, a posh neighborhood in the west end of the city.

I’m riding with Asunción, a photographer for a racy tabloid called La Prensa. We all arrive at the accident scene pretty much at the same time. We crowd around the ambulance carrying the pop star’s son. He’s lying on a stretcher with a paramedic sitting at his head. The photographers climb right inside the ambulance and start snapping away. I feel sorry for the guy inside – although he doesn’t seem badly hurt, he’s obviously anguished and confused, and seems on the verge of tears, and I can’t understand why the paramedics or the police don’t shoo us all away. But I need this footage for my documentary, so I start shooting as well.

Later, back at the Angel, I strike up a conversation with Manuel, a prosperous corporate lawyer who owns his own ambulance, and has spent every Friday and Saturday night for the past fourteen years running a volunteer rescue service. He’s based at the Angel because it offers convenient access to most of the city’s main arteries.

Manuel sort of reminds me of Robert De Niro’s character in Taxi Driver, talking about all the filth and corruption and degeneracy that seeps out onto the streets of Mexico City after dark. He tells me that ordinary Mexicans are afraid of getting picked up by official ambulances, because they’re often robbed by the paramedics. “They’ll say to you, ‘I need to take your pulse,’ and they’ll take off your watch because it’s in the way. Then they tell you they’re going to listen to your chest, but your wallet’s in the way, so they remove that as well. By the time you get to the hospital, you’ve lost everything.”

His ambulance has a bumper sticker that reads, “I save lives. What do you do?” Manuel tells me that doing rescue work probably saved him from alcoholism – or at least boredom – but I wonder if he isn’t also motivated by the same morbid fascination, the same slightly shameful voyeuristic thrill, that I get when I go out with the crime reporters.

Manuel finally gets a call from his dispatcher to go and assist a beating victim somewhere north of where we are. He gets all excited and climbs into the driver’s seat, and as he switches on the flashing lights and siren, his face is a picture of almost rapturous joy. In a moment, he’s gone.

I heard recently about a Japanese photographer who travels to Mexico every year to shoot material for a crime magazine at home. Not only does he visit the scenes of crimes and accidents, he attends autopsies and does the rounds of the city morgue. In Japan, they don’t allow photographers or cameramen to film the victims; in Mexico, anything goes. He makes enough money from a month in Mexico City to be able to spend half the year traveling. Mexico, it turns out, is a big exporter of blood and gore.

I recall the footage I shot earlier of the pop star’s son, and it occurs to me that I was the only TV cameraman on the scene. It also occurs to me that I could try to sell it to a local television station. I wonder how much they’d pay – $200? $300? I could certainly use the money. I recall the boy’s anguish in the ambulance. I think he was actually sobbing by the time we left.

In the early hours before dawn, I find myself riding with Graciela, a photographer who works for a weekly newspaper called El Alarma (the Alarm). El Alarma is the goriest newspaper I’ve ever seen. It seems to specialize in full-color photos of corpses of every variety – decapitated, shot, dismembered, decomposed, charred, hacked by machetes, smashed by falls from heights, run over by cars, even mummified. No detail is spared – not the flies on the body of the headless, naked woman murdered by a jealous lover (headline: “They disposed of her body like garbage!”); nor the bite marks on the abandoned newborn baby eaten by dogs and rats (“Damn hyena!”); nor the bullet wounds on the bodies of gang members killed in a shoot-out (“It hurt to death!”). This is what Mexicans call “la nota roja,” or red news.

Graciela is accompanied by her eighteen-year-old daughter, Luz. At first, I find it strange that she would expose one of her own children to the horrors of her work. Later I realize that it’s quite common for night reporters to bring along their friends, wives and girlfriends on the job – for one thing, it relieves the boredom, plus it makes for an exciting, if unconventional, night out on the town.

But the rest of the night is relatively uneventful. We’re called out to three car accidents: the first is just a fender-bender; the second knocks over a telephone poll and a newspaper kiosk. There’s an ambulance on the scene, and inside there’s a guy with bleeding head injuries – apparently, he’s the passenger (the driver has fled). When I decline to film the injured man, Graciela gets irritated with me, like I’m not doing my job. “Come on, Goyo,” she says as we get back into the ambulance, “you should be smarter than that!”

The third accident takes place on the Periferico freeway, a major artery that runs along the city’s west side. But they’ve cleared away the wreck before we even get there. “That could have been good,” mutters Graciela as we head for base. “It was a Z1″ – police dispatch code for one cadaver.

I get home after dawn. I’m still thinking about that footage I shot of the pop star’s son. I go through the material to see what I actually shot. I watch it in my office, on a video monitor, and it’s a lot better than I expected.

I have the “money shot” – a close-up of the injured teenager. I have shots of his damaged car (a blue Neon), the two guys in the vehicle they hit (in police custody), and his cousin Eduardo, pushing his way through the reporters. The orange glow of the streetlights frames the ambulance in a halo, giving it a kind of European art-house feel. It all plays like some gritty, reality-based TV drama.

I get out the Yellow Pages and look up the phone number for TV Azteca, one of the two big national broadcasters. I ask the receptionist to put me through to the newsroom. What a waste, I think, if it doesn’t get broadcast.

Regards,

Greg