'Blood of Their Brothers' Journalist Speaks

A response to former Union-Tribune border reporter Anna Cearley

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Editor's note: San Diego Magazine investigative journalist s.d. liddick, author of The Border Trilogy, responds to former San Diego Union-Tribune border reporter Anna Cearley's response to "Blood of Their Brothers," the first of the trilogy. The story, along with Cearley's comment, can be found here.

Anna, you were always my favorite border reporter, and I hope life after the Union-Tribune is treating you well. The heart of your objection to "Blood Of Their Brothers: The Border Trilogy, Part I" seems to be with the assessment of local newspaper performance apropos the border (“bad newspaper coverage,” as the article put it). To be sure, the phrase should have included all media (not excluding TV and radio stations, Voice of San Diego, San Diego CityBeat, the Reader, etc.), but space was an issue. But was the term too harsh?

Tijuana is one of Mexico’s biggest, most vital (and violent) plazas, and one of the three major drug thoroughfares into the United States. Drugs and illegal immigration, meanwhile, are two of the biggest and most important stories of this generation. Tijuana, therefore, has a one-third stake in the biggest stories of our time. (The DEA claims that at one point, the Tijuana Cartel was responsible for up to 70 percent of the cocaine crossing into the U.S.) All of which means the news gathering apparatus of San Diego — which is far wealthier, broader and capable than its Tijuana counterpart — has a national obligation to shoulder.

The U-T, a regional paper, has a national obligation because no other outlet is covering this acutely important thoroughfare. Maybe the Los Angeles Times feels some responsibility for it, though until recently it relied on local coverage that was spotty and ineffective (as you point out, the Times has stepped up its game lately). The other major U.S. dailies seem to share the strategic outlook imparted by the foreign editor of The Washington Post — “We’re covering the border region from our Mexico City bureau and we’re doing a good job of it” — something akin to covering D.C. politics from Anchorage, Alaska. The major American dailies have failed at the border because they don’t have intimate contact with it.

They send their reporters to Mexico City (to report from expensive offices and eat at posh restaurants in the Polanco) while the real action of narcopolitics is happening hundreds of miles away in the mountains of Michoacan, and thousands of miles away on ranches in the hinterlands of border towns like Tijuana and Rosarito. Maybe they don’t put their reporters at the border because it’s too dangerous. But that answer is too easy. I suspect they don’t permanently place reporters in places like Tijuana because they’ve ceded, for economic reasons, that line of coverage to the dailies of note in the border regions of Juarez, Tamaulipas and San Diego.

The majors aren’t going to compete with regional dailies that (ostensibly) already have the border covered and dwarf their satellite offices in terms of resources and manpower. The question, then, is to whom have the majors ceded coverage? The facile answer is that they’ve abdicated responsibilities to those Mexican and American regional papers — but that comes with an important caveat. As is pointed out in "Blood Of Their Brothers," Mexican dailies are already failed.

Two years ago, the Union-Tribune held a panel discussion at its Fashion Valley office complex, which examined border coverage. Several Tijuana reporters spoke and they said something like this: We’re scared for our lives and it directly effects our reporting. Another decorated Tijuana reporter, who moved to Los Angeles to work, echoed his colleagues’ sentiments in a private conversation. Adding to that collective indictment, I have a deep source who was closely involved with the investigation into the assassination of Tijuana Police Chief Federico Benitez.

That source assures me that before Benitez died, he imparted to other officers a number of important figures. One of them was the amount of money he (Benitez) was supposed to be paid by the mafia for his cooperation as the head of the Tijuana plaza — $100,000 a month (which, apparently, was longstanding protocol). Another, lesser-known figure, was $20,000 a month. That, the source said, was the cartel payoff divvied up every month between a number of people related to the newspaper business in Tijuana. That was in 1994.

On their own, the source’s claim and the confession of Tijuana’s own writers condemn that city’s papers to irrelevance and rebuke. But in the larger picture, in light of the fact U.S. major dailies have effectively abandoned continual border coverage (Mexico’s major dailies are so far away they’re a nonfactor in Tijuana), the pressure on U.S. regional papers has ramped up — in fact, their failure would mean a vacuum of coverage at the border. To measure the success of the U-T, a one-third stakeholder in two of the biggest stories of the new century, the Duke Cunningham case might be enlightening.

Cunningham operated a racket of graft in the shadows of Capitol Hill and through obnubilated bank accounts. There were no accusations floating around him (as is the case with Mexican mobsters — which gives anybody investigating them a head start); Cunningham carried out his crimes quietly and with discretion. It took the hard work of a good reporter — Marcus Stern, formerly of the Copley Press — to dig into Cunningham’s property records and cull out some deep truths. A team of U-T reporters doggedly pursued the story and was deservedly rewarded with a Pulitzer.

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