♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey, hey ♪ Hey, hey (upbeat music) - Good evening, and welcome to Horizonte, a program that looked at current issues from the Hispanic perspective.

I'm Julio Cisneros.

In this episode, we talk about journalism, a highly gratifying but challenging career.

In some countries, being a journalist is risky.

Mexico is the second most dangerous country in the world for journalists.

So far, 14 journalists have been killed during this year, according to Reporters with Without Borders.

I spoke with a journalist from Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, who has received death threats from doing his job.

Not once, but several times.

(journalist speaking foreign language) - Here to talk more about this issue is Katherine Corcoran, an independent journalist who serve as the AP Bureau Chief in Mexico City.

Also, she is the author of "In The Mouth of The Wolf," recently released.

Thank you for joining me today, Katherine.

- Thank you for having me.

- It's a pleasure.

I wanna ask you about your book.

You said in your book that when you were working in Mexico, you received a call and it was from a cartel.

Can you share that experience with us?

- Yes, it was my first day as Bureau Chief in Mexico City, and actually it was a call from the editors at the Associated Press because the threat had come to a journalist via his cell phone.

It was a text message telling him that the AP had to write a certain story or that we would receive a special visit, and the threat listed the address of the AP office.

And so we knew immediately that the office and anyone in the office could potentially be in danger, and we had to handle that right away.

- How did you handle that in that case?

- Well, at that time, I had already been in Mexico as a journalist for about two years, and so I knew about the attacks on journalists, and I said, we need to take this very seriously.

And the agency, of course, did take it very seriously.

They had an investigation done, they traced the telephone, we had increased security measures put into the office, and in the end, they were not able to determine whether the threat actually came from a cartel.

As the message said, it said it came from the Zetas, and so they could not really determine in the end what it was if it was a hoax.

But, yes, we had to really change our security protocol as a result.

- You covered the case of Regina Martinez, a journalist killed, this journalist was from Veracruz, Mexico.

Why this case is so important?

- Well, when these cases were happening the time I became Mexico City Bureau Chief, there was already a spike in journalist killings, and the government would dismiss them by saying that the journalists were killed weren't real journalists.

They were corrupt.

They were working for Narcos, that we should not consider them to be journalists as we were journalists, and they really tried to downplay the cases, and we didn't really know because there was no transparency.

There was no investigation of these cases.

The government would just say, oh, they were (speaking foreign language), end of story.

And so when Regina was killed, we knew for sure that was an attempt to silence a journalist and silence suppress because she was very well known as being honest, tenacious, a real digger.

She went out in the street.

She went to remote parts of the state to ask questions and find out what was really going on on the ground.

And she was very uncomfortable to the authorities for that reason.

- Also, in your book, you mentioned that some journalists also accept bribes from organized crime, but also from the government.

- Right, it was very difficult and continues to be difficult to discern some of these cases, and that's why the government formerly said, they were all corrupt journalists.

And so, because the tradition in Mexico was for the government under the PRI, the authoritarian party, to control the press and pay the press, and then when the narcos came in, they picked up the same tactics to keep the press quiet and keep the press in line, and so that was the tradition in the press.

But the time that Regina was reporting, there were a lot of reporters trying to buck that tradition and trying to be real, independent, honest journalists, and they were the ones who became targeted because they weren't following the old rules.

- When you were living and working in Mexico, did you receive any death threats or did you feel unsafe?

- I never did personally, but we were very careful about security for all the journalists, and we had security protocols for any journalist going out into the field to report a story.

I maintained also my own security protocols, but in my particular case, fortunately nothing like that ever happened.

- Martinez case is in your book, obviously, and do you think this case changed your life or maybe as a journalist now you see the world the career from a different perspective?

- Definitely, that case had a huge impact on me, which is why I decided to write the book.

I had actually talked to Regina about six months before she died.

I never met her in person, but I had tried to hire her to do a story for the Associated Press, and so I knew the quality of her journalism, and other editors in the office knew as well.

And so when she was murdered, it really hit me in a way that it made the cases, and there were so many happening every year.

It made it more personal for me, but also it made me realize that I wanted to bring more light to this subject.

I thought as a foreign journalist, at least I can bring this story to a wider audience.

I can tell the story of these brave journalists and what the conditions they're working under the threats, the people who have to leave for their safety and also to investigate what really happened to her because there was a huge cover up of her case because somebody very powerful was behind it and didn't want anyone making that connection.

So, the cover up in her case was very swift and very complete.

So for those two reasons, I really wanted to write the book.

- Cases like Martinez, in your case, these cases like this encourage you continue, or do you think make me, I don't know, make you feel like unsafe, or maybe you think you wanna stop doing journalism?

- Well, it's actually the opposite.

What I really wanted to show in this book is what journalists do.

I think a lot of people don't understand what we do.

I don't think they understand how we gather information and how we verify, and that it's a different kind of information from just everything you see out there on the internet, that we have standards, and we have ethics.

And she was a reporter who really made a difference with the stories that she wrote.

And I wanted to show that to people what journalists do for a society, but also what happens when the independent press goes away.

Because after her killing, the press in that state was almost completely silenced.

The people who were doing aggressive work, like Regina, had to leave for their own safety, and other journalists just chose to self censor again for their own safety.

And so, with the absence of an independent free press, the government became the criminal enterprise and was preying on its own citizens.

There were billions of dollars stolen from the public treasury.

There are thousands of people disappeared in Vera Cruz, and there was no reliable independent voice telling the people what was going on around them, and they were basically living in fear.

And so I wanted to show what we do, what happens when that voice is taken away.

But also kind of the happy ending in the story is that this government regime was eventually brought down by journalists.

Investigative journalists came in and wrote about what they were doing, and their house of cards fell.

And so it's a way to tell the story of journalism to a wider public, to a wider audience but also to people around the world outside of Mexico that they would support these journalists and understand what they're doing and give them some backup because they're really isolated and working on their own in a lot of cases.

- All right, we have about 30 seconds, but I wanna ask you, how about being a journalist in the US, do you think being a journalist in the USA is going in the same path as Mexico?

- It is, and that's what concerned me when I was writing the book is that a lot of the things I saw in Mexico are starting to happen here.

There are a lot of attacks now on journalists in the United States, and journalists can become a target now just by identifying themselves as a journalist, and in my many decades in my career in the US, that never happened.

And so I think the story in Mexico is also a cautionary tale for us in terms of attacking, discrediting the press, calling the press the enemy of the People.

- Thank you very much for being with us, Katherine, and good luck with your book.

- Thank you for having me.

- That's our show for tonight.

For Horizonte and a Arizona PBS, I'm Julio Cisneros.

Have a good evening.

♪ Hey, hey ♪ (upbeat music)