Reportero Press Kit P1 - Human Rights Watch Film Festival

Baja journalist profiled in documentary "Reportero"
Sergio Haro is Mexicali's correspondent for Zeta newsweekly
By Sandra Dibble
Friday, March 16, 2012
A veteran Baja California journalist is the central figure of a new documentary that explores the perils of
writing about organized crime in Mexico.
“Reportero” profiles Sergio Haro Cordero, one of a number of Baja California journalists who have
continued to cover sensitive topics in the face of danger. He says he loves his profession and cannot imagine
doing anything else.
The documentary “is a story about freedom of expression, about persevering, about the day-to-day work of
being a reporter,” said Bernardo Ruiz, the 38-year-old New York-based writer and director of the film.
Both Ruiz and Haro are expected to attend Sunday's screening of the 71-minute documentary at the San
Diego Latino Film Festival. Its launching comes as threats against Mexican journalists have persisted, and led
to news blackouts in some parts of Mexico. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has
confirmed the death or disappearance of at least 40 Mexican journalists during the past five years in
connection with their professional activities.
“You can’t take it lightly, nor pretend it could never happen to you,” Haro, 55, states in “Reportero.”
He has lived through the killings of close colleagues and was assigned state bodyguards following a death
threat in 1999, when he was editor of the Mexicali newsweekly Sietedias. The publication has since folded,
and Haro now reports from Mexicali for Zeta, the Tijuana-based newsweekly focused on crime and
corruption where two staff members and a bodyguard have been shot to death.
The danger continues. The Committee to Protect Journalists is investigating new reports of death threats over
the past month against Zeta and Diez4, a newsmagazine started by young journalists.
This month, the Mexican Senate’s approved a constitutional amendment that makes attacks on journalists a
federal offense. While applauding the move, committee director Joel Simon said in a statement: “it is only
one step in the fight against impunity, a fight that will not be won until the killers of journalists are tried and
sentenced.”
Ruiz, whose credits include a 2008 documentary about the late Puerto Rican baseball player Roberto
Clemente that aired on the PBS series “American Experience,” said his decision to focus on Mexican border
journalism happened by chance. Ruiz was exploring the possibility of a short piece about a shelter for young
migrants in Mexicali when he met Haro two years ago and decided to switch subjects.
“I thought, ‘His stories are more urgent than anything I’ve been thinking of,’” Ruiz said in a telephone
interview. “If I had planned to do this, I don’t know that it would have worked. Every step of the way, it
became inevitable to tell Sergio’s story — and to tell the story about journalism and Baja California and the
border.”
Much of the documentary is devoted to Zeta and its late co-founder, Jesús Blancornelas, drawing on archived
interviews and old photographs, as well as extensive interviews with the current co-editors: Adela Navarro
Bello and Rene Blanco, who is Blancornelas’ son.
“What I hope that this film does is show another face of Mexico and highlights the important work of a group
of reporters who have defied cartels and corrupt politicians,” Ruiz said. “It’s something that if you pull back,
the issues resonate with journalists in Russia, Pakistan and other parts of the world. Sergio doesn’t have to
travel overseas for a conflict. He’s covering it in his backyard.”
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“The only link between the newspaper and my father,” recalls René Blanco, the co-director of Zeta and the son of Blancornelas, “was my mother. She would take the original
pages across the border for him to edit. Sometimes she crossed two or three times a
day.”
Film footage from Blancornelas further documents the necessity to maintain the
weekly’s independence.
“The newspapers have always been controlled by businessmen or politicians,” he says,
“And when I worked for them I couldn’t write what I saw. I don’t mean my own
opinions, but what I witnessed with my own eyes.”
This unbending standard to tell the truth is still upheld as the editorial mission of Zeta,
which seeks to expose the wrongdoings of the Mexican government. And as a result, the
weekly’s pursuit to maintain its freedom of speech has compelled Zeta to print outside
of any Mexican influence in California.
“In the 1980s, PIPSA, the only company that sold paper [in Mexico], was owned by the
government,” explains Navarro. “If they liked what you wrote, they’d sell your paper. If
they didn’t, you wouldn’t get any…”
Navarro explains that Zeta continues to print in California because of their “distrustful
nature.”
“It’s more expensive to print in the U.S.,” she says. “Each time the peso devaluates
against the dollar, it weakens us. But it guarantees our freedom of expression.”
As Ruiz’s film penetrates deeper into the psychology of investigative journalism, it also
provokes the viewers to consider what newspapers say about them as readers. Recent
sales show that Zeta’s readership prefers stories about drug violence and crime over political and social pieces.
“When we publish a political story on our front page,” says Blanco, “it doesn’t sell as
well as a narco story. If it were up to the newspaper vendors, the paper would be dripping blood.”
This is particularly disheartening for reporters like Haro, who do not want to desensitize their readers with chronicles of gratuitous violence. They aim, alternatively, to create a greater sense of empathy between drug war victims and the general population.
The film has performed moderately well at the box office here, and commentators have been
enthusiastic. “At a moment when blood drips from the newspapers, ‘Miss Bala’ concerns itself with
something unexplored: the secret life of panic, the way that crime invades the everyday and
mentally corrodes people who are outside its actions,” the novelist and essayist Juan Villoro wrote.
National trauma often spurs the home cinema to probe the wounds. Think of the films from the
countries of the former Yugoslavia. But so far most Mexican filmmakers seem reluctant to deal
directly with the drug war. Besides fear of a violent reaction from the cartels, one reason may be
that the first movie about this Mexican tragedy — Luis Estrada’s “El Infierno,” released in 2010 —
was so unflinching in its gaze that younger directors may be wary of approaching the same subject
matter to avoid comparison, said Rafael Aviña, a film critic and screenwriter. But he added that
these directors were translating the fear and paranoia that the drug war was generating into other
genres, like horror movies and science fiction, using them as metaphors for the current situation.
An acid satire, “El Infierno” (“Hell” in English), was a critical and box-office hit and featured one of
the most memorable screen narcos in years, El Cochiloco (Joaquín Cosío), a barrel-chested
psychopath with a raucous sense of humor and an unshakable loyalty to his childhood friend,
Benny García (Damián Alcázar). Benny returns to his desolate hometown after 20 years in the
United States to find it in the grip of a murderous drug boss, falling in with El Cochiloco and his
gang of hitmen.
Mr. Estrada transforms the gore into humor, but he abruptly shifts the tone in torture scenes to
make his audience squirm. And the ending, in which Benny’s nephew takes revenge, is Mr.
Estrada’s bleak warning. “The past generation saw corruption and impunity as normal,” Mr.
Estrada said. “Now there is a generation that sees violence as normal.”
Narco films in Mexico have been around since the 1970s, with filmmakers churning out dozens of
formulaic versions. Pirated copies of the old movies sell in markets here, along with gruesome
newer versions pumped out for home video.
Mr. Estrada, 49, turned the conventions of the old films on their head, but younger directors, Mr.
Aviña said, may be wary of a genre associated with such low-end moviemaking. Conservative
television networks in Mexico have mostly avoided the subject. But there is an appetite: “La Reina
del Sur” (“The Queen of the South”), based on a novel by the Spanish writer Arturo Pérez-Reverte,
is a joint American, Spanish and Colombian production (although much of its creative team is
Mexican) that was a success here. With the melodrama of conventional telenovelas, it tracks a
Mexican woman’s rise as a drug boss in Spain.
A few documentary filmmakers have begun to treat the topic obliquely. Natalia Almada spent a
year in the Jardines del Humaya cemetery in Culiacán, in the heart of Mexican drug country, where
the families of slain traffickers erect air-conditioned mausoleums to their fallen men. Her resulting