Taco With Bullets
Taco With Bullets John Holman | Al Jazeera English Correspondent – Mexico
I was sitting in the backseat of a car driving across a hillside track in Michoacan, southwest Mexico. Ours was the only car on the road. The signs on either side were riddled with bullet holes, and on the tarmac itself were scrawled the letters CJNG. All of them indicated the same thing; we were in territory controlled by the Jalisco New Generation cartel (CJNG - to go by its Spanish acronym), one of Mexico’s two most powerful criminal groups. We were trying to get to the town of Aguililla, on the other end of this mountain road. But there was a problem. Aguililla was under siege, from the CJNG on one side, and United Cartels, another criminal group, on the other. Meanwhile the townspeople were trapped in the middle, desperate for an end to the blockade, and suffering its impact. We spent five hours making our way across the mountains. Passing three checkpoints that the CJNG had set up. At one of them, their commander gave us an interview; standing at the centre of a band of his men and telling us why they were going to war. It was great television. Men with machine guns and bandoliers. Masks and military gear and bullet ridden trucks. But in the story that we finally filed from Aguililla, the whole spectacle barely made it in.
There was a reason for that. We knew we had to concentrate on the townspeople, rather than the cartels trapping them there. Daniela and Gabriela, who couldn’t get their grandfather to the nearest hospital and lost him to a stomach ulcer as a result. Maria and Alfonso, who were on the verge of losing their taco business because of the lack of supplies. Fernando, a teacher in the town who’d dared to complain to the state governor about the lack of action against the cartels. We knew we had to concentrate on them because that’s simply how Al Jazeera works. The voice of the voiceless is the motto. Other things might be more clickable; a focus purely on the Mexican cartels might generate more traffic. But our commitment is that our lens will be focused on the local people at the heart of the story. It’s what attracted me to the channel when I walked in to its Mexico bureau for the first time as a disheveled but enthusiastic intern twelve years ago. And our team still tries to live up to that mission statement now. Of course, we report on the cartels too. Their violence, weaponry and drug labs. The politicians and Mexico’s security forces.
284
285
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter