 Hi, welcome and thanks for joining the New America Fellows Program for a discussion of Azama Med's new book, Fear is Just a Word, a missing daughter, a violent cartel, a mother's quest for vengeance. I'm Jonathan Blitzer, a 2021 Emerson Collective Fellow and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Before we start, just two quick housekeeping notes. The first is, if you have questions during the event, please submit them through the Q&A function and we'll get to them in the second half of the event. And then most importantly, so important in fact that I'm going to repeat the housekeeping note from the intro you just heard, copies of Fear is Just a Word are available for pre-order through our bookselling partner, Solid State Books. You can find a link to buy the book on this page. Just click buy the book. Okay, I have two bios for Azama Med. The first is official. Azama Med, 2022 Emerson Collective Fellow at New America is an international investigative correspondent for the New York Times. He's the former New York Times Bureau Chief in Mexico and previously was the Times Bureau Chief in Afghanistan. The second sort of unofficial introduction and it's one that I certainly know other journalists would relate to is just the fact that anytime Azam's byline appears, it's a kind of situation where we know we're in for something major. He's the kind of reporter whose work you read standing up wherever you are on your phone. There's never time to get comfortable. You just have to lunge right into it. And that's always been the case for his work and is especially the case for his really remarkable new book. It's a total honor to welcome him and to be able to talk to Azam about this incredible achievement. So welcome. Wow. That's maybe the nicest introduction anyone's ever given me. Thank you. And then a few... Oh, well, thank you. And this is, I mean, you know, this is one of those situations where we have, we have what looks on paper like a lot of time and I'm immediately going to get overwhelmed by how much there is. I want to ask you, but I want to start sort of at the beginning, just to kind of bring people into this story. Tell us about the sort of main, how you first learned about the story of Miriam Rodriguez and kind of what you first knew, what opened your eyes to the thing that she was going through. It was 2017, I remember it exactly because I was in the middle of working on another project. We were doing a project on Pegasus in Mexico and there was just no time for anything. But I picked up a local paper and there was a blurb, literally just a paragraph about the death of an activist in northern Mexico. And one throwaway line about how she had gone after the people who had taken her daughter and then been killed. And I thought like, wow, is that like, did I just make that up? Is that real? And I read it a few times and I remember I filed it away and thought like, I'm coming back to this because either it's not true or there's something exceptional about it. And I remember as a metro reporter, you would hear these small little things and then you just go and you'd actually dig into it. And I found that that same sort of approach works with international journalism. So the following year, I went up to Damolipas and I met with her son and sadly Miriam had passed. She was killed in 2017 and I sat down with her son and he just told me this incredible story and it started there, you know, the things he was saying, I thought like, wow, I expected him to be like, no, no, no, that newspaper was, they were just making that, he validated everything. So it started with a blurb. And how wary was he of talking to you at that moment? I mean, his mother had recently been murdered for her activism. What kind of reticence did you encounter at that point? I think he was, he was experienced in dealing with reporters. I don't think he dealt with international reporters at that point, but others in sort of the Damolipas Northern Border, Borderlands, dynamic local journalists, he dealt with before. He was wearing that he didn't know me and he thought I was just someone else looking to like pick up a few tidbits about what had happened to his mother, but he, to his credit, he engaged with me. We met with a several other activists. He kind of, he told me the outline of a story, nothing I could publish, but enough to pique my interest and make me want to invest some time. Yeah. And at that point, how much did you know? I mean, were you hearing for the first time kind of the full arc of Muriam's story? So for people watching, and many of you probably know this from some of the times reporting, but essentially in 2014, Muriam's daughter is kidnapped and murdered. And over the following three years, Muriam against kind of unspeakable odds with what we'll get into manages to track down and capture nearly everyone who'd been involved in her daughter's kidnapping and murder. I think ultimately it was 10 people. She kind of successfully wrangled, which is no small thing in any place, especially Mexico. Were you, you know, so you see this notice in a newspaper, you go to speak to Muriam's son. Did you at that point kind of have a full sense of the magnitude of what she had done or were you were you learning as you went early on? I mean, I'll be honest, even after I'd written that article, I realized there was so much I didn't know. But when I first met him, it was one of those things where when when you meet someone and they tell you an incredible story, your first instinct is, wow, that's amazing. And then your second instinct is, but how will I ever validate what this person's telling me, right? His mother's dead. It's not like there's a lot of documentary evidence you can get your hands on. And so I knew it was it was interesting enough that I knew I was going to make the investment to try and find it, to try and find a way to validate it. And I kind of forewarned my editors like, look, this could turn out not to be a story. If I can't get the kind of corroborating evidence I need, because what he's telling me is just too fantastic in the in the sense of like too unbelievable to to just take it as word. And so that that was a long process was getting the Tamilipan authorities who are reticent by nature, almost hermetic. I refer to the Mexican government sometimes as like an untouched tribe. But yeah, I use the phrase the inbred lethargy of the system, which I thought was just perfect. It's exactly what it is. Yeah, it's completely. Yeah. And so once I started down that road and I kind of mapped out the different people I needed to talk to, to corroborate through both interviews and documentary evidence, I was I was able to move forward. But it was definitely something I was learning along the way. And I got to a point where I felt comfortable enough to start drafting out a story and figuring out what the what the actual plan for the story would be. And then what I realized is I was such a small portion of the overall story that I wouldn't come to until after I committed to writing a book. So so what's an example of a kind of fantastical detail that that Louise told you that you then thought, OK, wow, how do I need to sort of map this out? I need to make this sort of more concrete. I mean, because it's I imagine a complicated thing to kind of know where the line is that is sort of sufficient for corroboration when in a lot of these circumstances, it's almost impossible sometimes to confirm some of these details, which doesn't make them less true. Yeah, no, I know. And you don't want to discredit the person you're talking to, not only if they've been through this tremendous trauma, but. It would you don't you don't want to ask them questions that make them quite makes them think you're questioning their authenticity. But but I, you know, I had to and I kind of explained that all along like this and I'm not questioning your credibility. I just this is the process and this is how we work. I mean, some of the fantastical details like that she wore a disguise and dyed her hair red and put on uniforms and like did surveys of entire neighborhoods just to find one person's name. You know, she the name to like go after them and file an arrest warrant, you know, or that she buried her daughter twice because she found her daughter's remains in two different locations. I mean, that I think was the most astounding. I was like, how did that even happen? And it wasn't so much much later that I actually got the documentary evidence to see that. You know, or as I got to know him better, he would start to convey things to me that he'd not told me the first time around, including things that were like ethically questionable. And I would need to go and look through the archives that I eventually ended up obtaining to find out, find some sort of material backing for that. Yeah. And you mean ethically questionable, like bold things that Muriam herself had done to try to get to the bottom. Yeah. I mean, guns on people breaking into people's homes, the kind of thing that you do when I think you break with love, you know, your daughter, your daughter goes missing and you just kind of decide at least she did at that point. Like there is literally no thing that I won't do to to get my revenge and to find justice for her. It was interesting. I actually became a parent in the process of writing this book. And I just I understood it at a totally different cellular level. You know, I always understood the idea of it and had a deep well of sympathy. But that empathy was another another sort of valence, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When did you I mean, you did a remarkable amount of work just to get this story in its earliest infancy into the newspaper? At what point did you realize, all right, I've got I've got a book on my hands. I've got I've got an obsession that's, you know, going to take four years of my life. Was there a kind of moment or a series of moments where you began to realize that the only way for me to really dig in a proper sense here is to sort of go big, go the full distance. I mean, it's interesting. I'm like so clueless about the commercialization of ideas that I wrote this story, never thinking about a book or about film rights or anything. I just it was it was the same process I'd used for the dozens of other stories. And it wasn't honestly until after the story published and I started getting messages from publishers that I even began to consider. Well, maybe it could be a book. I play a completely different book about a completely different subject, still Mexico, but a wildly different thing. And I was actually working on that proposal when the story came out. And it just sort of I think maybe I discounted it initially because I thought, oh, it's a very like noir kind of thriller sort of thing. And I want to do something that's a bit more meditative. And then thankfully my agent sort of corrected that perspective. And sounded like we can use this in some ways in the best way. Right. You take a story that is readable and compelling and human. And then you can use that narrative to lard it with all the things you want to say about a place about Mexico, about governance, about impunity, about the history that sort of led it to this, you know, dark place that it's in now where the rule of law just doesn't function to be able to use a narrative, a sweeping sort of powerful narrative to carry that aloft. Felt like a privilege in some ways. Yeah. No, I mean, it's it's amazing how many kind of doors open in this story to kind of the broader state of affairs, not just in Mexico generally, but specifically in Temulipas and along the border. And it really is like sort of these worlds unto themselves that just unfold. Let me ask you this because I want to get into some of the broader contextual details. But tell me, I mean, the story that you wound up writing, did it differ in any surprising ways from what you felt like you had set out to do initially, were there kind of surprises in the story you found yourself telling in the end? It's a great question. Yeah, there were there were definitely a couple. First, I think I, you know, I knew I wanted the book not just to tell the story of this woman, but to answer the fundamental question. I think anyone who ever works in Mexico or even pays attention to the violent vagaries of it has asked, which is how did it get to be this way? Not the bywords of corruption and impunity we all use and narco violence, which kind of just becomes this generic catchall to explain this phenomenon, but a way to really connect it. And my fear was I didn't want to write, you know, a history and I don't want to write a white paper about the the genesis of organized crime and government, you know, in its capture of the government. And I think what I was surprised by is that the cartel that actually winds up killing and kidnapping and killing Miriam's daughter actually has this symbolic kind of representative history of the social decay, if you will, of Mexico. And so I started going back to the archives and a few key historians helped point me in the right direction to use that as a vehicle so that the story would stay tight. The narrative would stay with her, with this cartel and in this universe. But it could answer that more fundamental question of like, how did it get to be this way by tracing this cartel back to its origins in the 1930s? Yeah. So I was like sort of grateful that there was that that it coincided the history of this cartel with this this tremendous story of Miriam and her daughter. And I think other things surprised me or yeah, the the details I found out about Miriam herself, you know, there's a passage in the book and I hope I hope no one was planning to find the book, besides not to now, but spoiler alert. She's she actually sort of orchestrates this marine raid that kills, you know, a number six people who are either tangentially or directly involved in her daughter's kidnapping. It's the first thing she really does. And I I had been reading these things in the archives about how how half of these individuals were killed before she even started going after them. And I always suspected she was behind it, but I absolutely no evidence. And then finally, I got this case file and started going through it. And it sort of allowed me to gently pry the truth out of the family, because once I got the autopsy report and I tracked down the father of one of the Zetas who had been killed in this marine raid, I finally got enough information to be like, OK, I she she was behind this in some ways, you know, these extra judicial killings. So things like that and tell people who are watching. Because I mean, it's at this point that that details now kind of, you know, it's on the table. So let's let's talk about it. I mean, it's one of countless shocking details in the book. But but this one in particular, it's not like she sort of intentionally set off that particular chain of events, which is itself telling that, you know, here she is, you know, sort of trying to fight through bureaucracy at immense personal risk, given given the presence of the Zetas and the fact that she would have a target on her back for trying to get answers about her daughter's killing. And yet there is a kind of collision of forces between the government and members of this cartel that she kind of ignites. So to tell us a little bit more of the story of how, you know, her pursuing her killers winds up and being in touch with the authorities precipitates something like a kind of government massacre. Yeah, I mean, she she was interesting because I had a friend who was one time sort of he asked me, he was like, was she corrupt? You know, because she was able to do all these things and other people couldn't. And I thought about that question for a long time. And it wasn't corruption. She just did more. She went the extra mile to do the thing that the state no one was going to do for her. And that included making these contacts and these connections with people from all over Mexican law enforcement, never through the system, but through individuals, because individuals could be swayed, individuals could be brought into your cause, could be convinced of its of its merit. And so she, by pure chance, meets this Mexican Marine. And the Mexican Marines are like a lot of armed forces in countries where there's no real rule of law, they're extraordinarily violent. And, you know, they don't like to lead to let their enemies live to see another day or to fight another day. It's just sort of they're sort of known as like people who come in and just execute suspected would be narcos. And in this case, they went in and, you know, she met them. And so the story begins like this. She's driving around town in San Fernando is a small place. And she passes the Central Plaza and she sees two girls on a laptop. And she doesn't recognize the girls, but she recognizes a laptop and it's Karen's. And this is months after her daughter has been kidnapped, they paid ransom and she hasn't seen her back. They haven't heard anything back. So she calls the Marines and the Marines come to the scene and they abduct these two women. And I never get the full details, but it's pretty I'm pretty sure these girls were tortured and made to lead the Marines to the camp where the state is operated. Miriam had no idea this was going to be the eventuality of it. But nonetheless, she went with the Marines on that raid and they arrive at this ranch, which features prominently in the book because this is where Karen is actually killed. And sort of this grim slaughterhouse that Sethas used for all of their kidnapping victims. And the Marines go in shooting and they kill four of them. And when those four are dead and the Sethas are subdued, they're walking around and the Marines see the bodies of a few. And I'm sorry, it's pretty grim, but I wrote this in a way because I wanted it to be unflinching. I mean, if we're going to talk about violence in Mexico, I wanted to really talk about it. And the Marines find the body of a pregnant woman who's been beheaded and they lose it and they grab one of these girls that Miriam pointed out to them in the plaza and they execute her right there. And the other one, they almost play this sick game with they tell her to run. And if she can make it to the tree line, they'll let her live and they ultimately execute. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's just it's you see the kind of sort of a chicken or the egg kind of question, the sort of contagion of violence that comes from both sides, from the authorities who are dealing with deep sated biases of their own. But also, I imagine a deep frustration and about their inability to make any kind of inroads and fight in crime and the criminals themselves. And then all the people who were caught in between. Tell us about tell us about the SEPA and how they're different from other cartels. Because I think that's an important part of understanding the world of this book. Of course. Yeah. I mean, the SEPAs in summary are sort of the group responsible for militarizing violence in Mexico. When you look at the military on the streets, when you look at the kinds of caliber of weapons, the Narcos have the sorts of combat that's happening sometimes in various parts of Mexico. A lot of that traces back to this decision by a cartel leader to create the SEPAs. Now, this cartel leader came in in the late 90s and he took over a cartel known as a golf cartel. They were one of the oldest, you know, they've been around since the 1930s. They actually really got their start smuggling alcohol into the United States when the Bolstead Act was in place. And there was prohibition on alcohol, which is sort of a poetic book into what they do now smuggling another illicit substance in the United States. And he he takes over in the late 90s. And this is a time of like transition in Mexico. And he realizes as democracy in 2000, for the first time, a president who was not from the predominant party in Mexico one. And that sort of shattered all of the all the political paradigms that had existed prior to that, where it was one party rule, almost an autocracy. And this cartel leader had this ingenious sort of realization, which was the new currency of power is violence. We do not have a state that can stop us and it no longer has the command and control of the dominant political party to rein us in. And he decides, OK, I'm going to create my own praetorian guard. I'm going to recruit from the poorly paid but highly trained Mexican special forces. So he recruits this group and immediately their ability to maneuver within a criminal landscape is is incredible. And they're able to take over territory and dominate the trade. And ultimately, that group grows into the centers. And as they grow, it sort of metastasizes and everybody else starts to copy that because they realize we need when we need to be able to compete, including the government itself, recognizing our police forces can't handle these militarized cartels. And so everything becomes militarized. Ultimately, the centers become so powerful, they break off from the Gulf cartel their creators and that sparks the war between the two of them, which is kind of the backdrop of this book, this war between these. It's almost fraternal war between once allied cartels that then just sort of epitomizes the violence to come and sets the stage for a lot of what we see in Mexico today. Yeah, no, that was an incredibly cogent history of the centers. I mean, it's a no, it's a complicated, messy history. And I guess one thing that struck me, too, just in the characterizations in your book and the kind of on the ground reporting of how this it does were sort of inhabit the world of Miriam and her daughter and their family. I was sort of surprised by how like almost happenstance and disorganized a lot of the lower level members of the cartel works. I mean, it was they sort of seem to operate almost not quite as free agents, but just sort of they'd go this way and that they'd kind of like engage in sort of petty extortion schemes as they could. Sometimes those get violent, sometimes not. Sometimes they were picking orders, other times they were freelancing. It seemed especially chaotic. And I'd love to know your sense. I mean, was that was that is that just the kind of reality of what the ground level functions of the Zeta cartel look like? Or is that also a function of the time frame in which this book kind of mainly transpires? You know, 2015, 2016, 2017 after the governments really started to swoop in and maybe that's kind of caused some fragmentation of the cartel? Absolutely. I mean, it is it is very the book is very, very detailed because I wanted to make it feel as intimate and present as possible. But all of that is a some ways an allegory for a lot of what's happening in Mexico as a cartel's fracture and fragment. It's not this like clean command and control that I think we like to think of as cartels. I mean, they're sort of these federations of you know, of criminals who come together and have these loose alliances. And sometimes they work in concert and sometimes they work against each other. But I think I think, yeah, they they these individuals are not criminal masterminds. They are sort of byproduct of the war continuum, you know, where it grows from originally the structured and organized unit that then gets battered and blasted through actions of its own and also the government's pursuit of them. But then they just turn into this kind of feral organization that preys on the local community. And there are still people among them and above them who are orchestrating the broader things that we think of as cartel activities. But there's a real intimacy of violence in some of these smaller places. People know each other. They know who's who. And they, you know, it's not guys walking around with gold plated AK 47s. It's, you know, I call them subsistence gangsters. You know, these aren't people making lots of money. They are just part of an economy that exists where there is no other economy and where a life of violent crime has become so common. It's a line of work in a lot of cases. There's I was almost hesitant to pick a passage out to read just because there's there's such incredible stuff in here. And I didn't want to leave things out. But there's one there's one moment if I if you'll indulge me that I thought was like just really just hit me hard. And it was I think a relatively quiet moment in the course of the whole book, given just the stakes of what's going on and just the emotional drama of what happens. But there's a moment when when this this speaks to your point about sort of the subsistence gangsters and just the ways in which the this violence, no one is untouched by this violence because I want to ask you about kind of what it's like to be recording in this space. But basically, there's this moment when Miriam is helping she, you know, as a prominent activist, she helps a lot of other parents who are looking for the remains of their disappeared children. And in one case, she is kind of riding this grave digger named Samuel because he's sort of taking a long time in burying the discovered remains of one of the parents that Miriam is helping. And she learns that this grave digger himself had lost a child to kidnapping and murder. And you write, Samuel told her that he had never wanted to file a complaint because she's, of course, saying, well, I can help you. Let's file a complaint. Let's try to get some recognition. There are benefits you can get. He never wanted to file a complaint and had no plans to now. After his son had vanished, abducted while out with friends, the only closure he had received had been a visit from the men responsible who warned him to keep his mouth shut. The same men then attempted to extort him for seven hundred dollars, which made him laugh. He didn't earn that much in a month. It only reinforced how corrupt things were that these men would murder his son, felt entitled to demand from the dead boy's father, a sum greater than he could fathom. And of course, under the circumstances, he doesn't want to report any of this because he's got other kids and he worries that they'll be picked off. I mean, it really seems like in this world there's no clear logic to how to avoid some of these dangers. And I wonder psychologically, what does that mean for people who live in San Fernando? You know, what does that mean on a day-to-day level? And what kinds of things could you pick up in your reporting, talking to people about just the chaotic nature of this violence, which I think probably is terrifying in a particular way? Yeah, I mean, it's a I think it starts as a deep desperation and then hardens into a cynicism. You know, there is a there's a saying in Mexico. It's it's said across the country when someone gets killed in some kind of horrific way. And they say something like, I just can't have a man or send it down to those models, which is like, well, they were kind of walking on the wrong side of things. They were involved with the bad guys. And it becomes this sort of justification for the unthinkable a way to like countenance what's happening in your society. Because if you start to realize that innocents are being killed and it's as bad as it seems, you almost are paralyzed. You can't function. So a lot of people fled, you know, a quarter of that population led fled during the bad years. Those who could afford to or who had little enough that they had nothing to tether them to San Fernando. But others, you know, you endure you. World zones, war zones, the world over are filled with people who have figured out how to endure in the face of incredible trauma. But the way that it manifested in San Fernando was even more than a decade after these incidents had passed. People whispered when they talked to me, if they talked to me at all. And it took me months of of being there and talking to people for them to even open up off the record. I mean, that fear was so palpable because exactly as you say, there's no telling when it could strike you, much in the same way that people came to blame the victims for their own sort of misfortune. People also used to used to think, oh, well, the narcos only mess with men and people who are involved with them. And that simply wasn't true. And so those misperceptions, I think they they died hard. But when they died, they really stuck deep in people. And, you know, when you can't trust your neighbors, you can't trust the state. There is literally nowhere for you to go with your trauma. I think it I think creates a psychic almost like dementia in some ways in a society where I would ask people questions. What year did that happen? And they would just it's like, I asked them to give me like the, you know, the genetic code for their child. They were just like, I've I don't know. You know, they just it had literally been obliterated from their mind, suppressed or they could they could give me the highlight reels, but they could not. Again, trauma, I think, has that erasing function and it really had so widespread. I mean, I remember the first time I went to San Fernando, somebody asked me what it was like. And this was this was before I never thought of this book. I wanted to go to see it because of the things that had happened there in 2010. It was sort of this iconic landmark of Mexico's ruin. Seventy two people quickly. Yeah, two thousand and seventy two migrants had been killed in cold blood and left in the warehouse. Part of this war between the setters and the golf cartel. And then the next year, after that, it happened. Almost 200 people were found in mass graves around the periphery of San Fernando. Similarly, people who had been killed and abducted and then killed in the war between the setters and the golf cartel. This unfathomable amount of violence. And so I went there the first time and a friend asked me, what was it like? And I said it was like what I imagine the equivalent would be of walking around in a corpse, like a place that's just completely dead and completely empty and like spent of its own kind of tragedy and drama. And by the time I was going back from Miriam's story, life had come back. People were back to living, but you can't go from where they had been to any future without a long sort of cynical, I think, road that. That maybe is generational. I don't know. Yeah, I found it especially heartbreaking in the book as you point out just now to kind of see these different rationalizations that people use first in the early years of the worst of the violence. And then as the violence kind of slowly but steadily took over more and more aspects of life to say, oh, well, maybe that person was like doing something that was off or like, oh, you know what, like that person made kind of a rookie mistake. They were out at night. I won't do that. And just sort of almost to go down a checklist of things that you kind of precautions you think you're taking, which you kind of almost follow dutifully like a list. And then none of it matters because the violence of it is totally random. And then of course, and this is I think probably one of the core aspects of the trauma that you explore in the book, to lose a loved one and to not have the closure of, I mean, maybe you leave open the possibility that they've survived somehow. But even kind of reconciling with the fact that they die, not having the closure of knowing where they are, being able to bury them. That I have to imagine too is like its own, wreaks its own emotional havoc. Oh, yeah. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to write about this is because the disappeared when you interact with people who have had a loved one disappear, it's, it alters you. It changes the way that you think about humanity and how we survive traumas. The, the worst part is, is the torture is the hope. You know, the hope that my child might be alive. Like to lose a child is, you know, the worst thing you can imagine as a parent, but then to like lose them and not know what became of them. It leaves open this tiny door that maybe they're okay. Maybe they're fine. And that just destroys people. It destroys people in a way that's far worse than just an outright murder because they can't stop searching. And every day you don't spend looking for your loved one is a day that you hate yourself for not doing it, you know, and then to get past it, and you're never really past it, but to get past it, you almost have to kill your child in your own heart and mind, which is impossible for a parent. It's a, it is, it is maybe the, the darkest aspect of I think the, the war on drugs that has emerged, you know, this like, this quite efficient way to thwart justice, which is if there's no body, there's no crime, but you leave loved ones in a liminal space in this sort of perpetual state of torture. And, you know, once somebody does that to you, that becomes the, you know, it's like this depredation. It just keeps sinking and sinking because whatever new way somebody comes up with to kind of come after you, you then used to come after them. And so disappearances are now at 100,000 and counting in Mexico, 100,000 people just gone, erased, but without any evidence of what happened to them. Yeah. Yeah. You've reported in a number of different countries in a number of, you know, in kind of varied circumstances. What, what, what makes reporting in Mexico distinct? What are some of the unique experiences you've encountered as a reporter in Mexico as opposed to other places where you've, where you've been? I mean, I imagine each place presents its own challenges. Yeah. In Mexico, it's interesting. Like they, it's an incredibly, you know, obviously modern and sophisticated place, incredible human capital. But I mean, I sort of jokingly referred to it before, but I mean it. It's like the, the politics of that country. It's like the people who are enmeshed in it on the inside of it, they're like an untouched tribe, you know, they don't interact with the rest of the world. They have their own rules and ways of thinking about things and like the corruption, the disingenuousness, the governmental indifference. It's just, it is in bread in the system. It's something that began almost, you know, 90 years ago and continues to this day. I found it immensely hard to build sources at first because it's not the typical relationship where in the United States you call someone and eventually they start talking to you. They engage with you. There's a distrust or there's a respect that just disallows for that kind of intimacy in some cases that convinces people to leak things to you. I also stress on that their awareness or understanding of what I was trying to do was not always, they didn't really grasp like the nature of like, no, no, I need these documents because they'll explain this, this and this. It was a much harder thing to explain. But I think more than anything, there was just a hostility and an indifference towards the process and a culture in which it doesn't matter what the law says. It's what someone is willing to do. You know, Mexico has perfect laws, including freedom of information laws that would rival the United States. It's just nobody follows them, you know, that political will to implement them along with any number of other laws that are based on global human rights standards just doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to remind people, put your questions in that question field. If you've got them in a few minutes, we'll turn to questions. I just want to just sort of prime people for that. All right, I have to, we have a few minutes before we open this up for questions. I warned you I was going to do this, but I have to do it. We need to, we need to sort of nerd out for a second on the kind of structure of the book and how you achieved it because, I mean, one thing that I need to say to people who are in attendance is, I mean, this book reads, I mean, it reads novelistically. And you can, it's written so seamlessly that as a reader, you don't have any notion of how hard it was to string this all together and to make us feel like we were present for each of these moments. And so I have two questions for you on this before we open it up. The first is, tell us about the case files that you accessed. And because I know they're, I mean, I'll leave the details to you, but how those documents opened up the recording for you? Because I think it'll honestly astound people. It sounded me and I had an idea ahead of time of the kind of work that you put into this. So, thanks. You know, when I pitched the book, I pitched this like intimate look at like sort of what the front lines of the drug war looked like for the people living it. And then I had no idea how I was actually going to achieve that. I knew that there were these mysterious case files that Miriam had created herself. You know, she painstakingly done all these investigations and then kind of handed them or laundered them through the prosecution, the attorney general like Tamalipus in the state where all of this took place and that those records had been sealed, not only because they'd been sealed by the government itself, but because it was an ongoing investigation and no one had been convicted. No one ever gets convicted. So almost every case is classified. But I knew that I needed those documents to be able to tell the story. And I had no idea what was in them because even the family hadn't seen them. They get one point or another, they'd seen it, but it's like it was 20,000 pages. And I think just the task of going through that as a loved one would have been inconceivable. And so I spent just months and months and months and that was on top of like kind of understanding the levers I needed to pull source-wise to get what I needed before I could finally get these documents. And like it was 20,000 pages. I mean, it filled my entire living room. It was like chest high. Tell us, like what are 20,000 documents look like? Chest high? Yeah, we have a giant like, you know, eight person dining table. And it was like up to my eyes across the entire table. It was like, it was so astounding. I was like, I just like, I don't know if I have enough time in my life to read all of this and actually like get into it. And it's written in this like Baroque Spanish from like the 15th century that at first I thought was just poorly written, but I realized like the purpose of this language was to be impenetrable. You know, it was like to create a fortress around whatever it was buried in like the 50 pages you were reading that you needed to know. And so I eventually got good at kind of deciphering it and realized that a lot of the stuff, so not a lot, some of it was duplicative, but that became, you know, the Bible for the book. It became the spine upon which everything was based. I mean, I had an amazing research assistant and he and I created this timeline that I think ended up being 80 pages. And we went through and we scanned every relevant document and we put it in the cloud so that we could, so that when I was going through the timeline and trying to recreate what had happened, I could click on the actual documents referenced, whether it was testimony from one of the people who was arrested or like a forensic report from one of the grave sites where they dug up remains or whether it was one of Miriam's many sort of declarations that she gave to the authorities, kind of outlining what she'd figured out. And I think I probably had to read those documents three or four times before I really kind of, at least in my head, could understand what was happening. And then using this timeline and these intimate documents, then go back to the family because that was much more useful. Because once I knew the anchored event like what happened on this day at this time and in this place, they could then be like, oh my God, yeah, that's right. Mom did this and then this happened and then she did this and then I could take those details and potentially run them back through this matrix of data that I had now collected from this case file or through others who were present, you know, witnesses or the police, the prosecutors who actually did help or some of her own friends, you know, attorneys who represented some of the people who were implicated in this crime. But it was a, that was the only way I was going to be able to tell this story that way. I, you know, I sadly never had the pleasure of meeting Miriam, you know, by the time I heard about her story, she had already been killed. And so to recreate that was kind of this exercise and stitching together the documentary history that thankfully she herself had created. It was almost like communing with her in the past because like I could look at these things and I'm like, oh my God, I know what she's doing now. But she found this thing out and she knows the government's not going to act on it. So she is submitting an affidavit into the system because she knows that will force them into action and force them to do something. And it became this strange like world that I had to understand and decipher. But having that kind of that, I don't know, it's almost like a Rosetta stone or something to interpret what was going on was invaluable. I mean, the book wouldn't exist without that. I mean, that, I almost felt embarrassed when you and I first talked about this because I was like, so tell me, like when you first met Miriam, I mean, it was so inconceivable to me that you would have had no interaction with her given the level of sort of intimacy of these details. And so you're essentially using these documents, not only to structure the timeline and to get specific details and to like really anchor the facts, but it sounds like you're also using it almost to revive memories in people's minds that as you talk about before, they've had to kind of let sit dormant for various reasons of their own emotional preservation or the kind of general blur of trauma and confusion. So I mean, it almost seems like then is a device for coaxing kind of memories out of people, which is a very difficult thing. That's a great way to describe it. It sort of prompts them, like Samuel, I didn't know about that story. I met him and then we talked and it took me ages because he's, as you can imagine, he's a hardened old man, but he then told me the story and I was able to piece that together with her family and others, including the family whose graves she was helping to build. Or yeah, especially with her children, they would remember these things the second we started talking about it. And we did these, you know, they were so generous with their time. We did these hours-long interviews. I mean, hours and hours and hours when we would sit there and they would just sort of have memories and talk and I would find ways to insert details that I knew or things that I discovered, you know, obviously never trying to like spring anything on them, but just to prompt them. And it was a remarkable tool for that in particular because that gave it the intimacy. That allowed me to be like, this is what she was thinking because her daughter was there with her. And she's like, oh my God, my mom said this at the time, or she sent me this message. Look, I found it in her diaries as well. Helped with that, like her own books and notes. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of like a corollary. And you said early on in our conversation here, you know, one of the challenges is to corroborate things that would strike someone who's uninitiated in this world as totally fantastical. And it seems to me he or praising your book like a corollary of that is that, you know, to point out the kind of incredible poetic justice, the sort of full arc of this, that like the record that Miriam keeps to save all of these people or self included from oblivion essentially ends up for you being the skeleton key. I mean, it's the kind of thing that like, if I were just to say this, it would sound like far fetched or like cliche or over the top, but really has like the incredible virtue of having been the case here. Let me open this up. Let me just open up the questions because I want to be sure that people have time to ask them. So there are a few really good questions here. Let me start kind of with the most sort of straightforward and then we'll kind of go into things as they come up. But there are two questions about your personal safety and the safety of the people you interviewed, the subjects of your book. Talk us through that a little bit, kind of what your sense was of the dangers both to yourself and also how you kept the people you were talking to kind of safe to the degree that one can. Yeah. I mean, the second part of that question is really something I've thought a ton about. For me, you know, like it's, I'm an American citizen and a journalist for the New York Times. And of course that doesn't protect me, but it is certainly a pretty valuable shield to have. And I, you know, you think about things and you try and do what you can on the margins to make sure that you're not taking unnecessary risks. But I don't tend to think or talk too much about my safety when the stakes are so high for everybody else. You know, it just sort of feels like a strange thing to talk about when the person I'm interviewing has lost a mother and a sister, you know, and lives with this very sort of palpable fear all the time. For Jonathan, you and I talked about this the other day. Mike, you know, I do a lot of investigative work and when it comes to businessmen, politicians, people of wealth and means and power, the supposition is on the record. Like if you're talking to me, it's on the record. And no, you can't hide behind some bullshit excuse about, you know, whatever. When I'm talking to victims of trauma, people who are living in these sorts of fraught conditions where life is very, very fragile, it's always off the record. Whether they know it or not, you know, nothing they say to me will be used until there has been a full and fulsome discussion about it. And so in the case of Miriam's family, it was an honest conversation. I mean, the book couldn't exist without their cooperation and without them going on the record. And her son and daughter are incredibly brave. And I think, I touch on this a little bit in the epilogue, you know, they, I think they feared that their mother's story would be lost, you know, that this tremendous consummate sacrifice that she'd made for her daughter to fight back against the indifference of the state and the violence of these cartels would dissipate in time. You know, the individuals that she got arrested, a lot of them are already out of prison and others are probably going to be released because there's no like Miriam to continue fighting this battle. And I think they just didn't want their mother's legacy to be some Ozymandian ruin in the desert, you know, barely, you know, barely noted. And so her son was determined like he knew going on the record, sharing these details, you know, having people talk in his family was essential to recording this story. And then, you know, I mean, I literally, I did a hundred formal interviews for this book, but there were so many more people I spoke to just about like, what was the, what was the feeling? What was the vibe in this place at this time? How did it, you know, what did the sky look like, you know, how did the sunset, you know, the detail about people, you know, closing the shutters on their home. You know, somebody described to me like, I am legend, you know, like the, as sun is setting, people are, you know, the vampires are coming. Like it was that scary for people. Those details I could use, but I never, you know, I just, so many people were too scared to talk to me. And so their names were left out, you know, it was a, it was always a multifaceted conversation. You know, some people's names were changed because that was what they asked for. Other people's testimony just never came. But it was, you know, it's the stakes are so high in a place like San Fernando. And even though it's gotten much, much safer, you know, people, the last thing I need to be doing is traumatizing people by like bullying them into participating in my book. Of course, of course. Here's another question. And I'm glad it's asked because I realize I almost made light of what was probably a year's long drama for you. The question is how you managed to access the case file. And I realize you're constrained in what you can talk about in the way of sources. But like, I realized that like built into my conversation with you about it here, I'm like, oh, right. So like, tell us about the case file. And we focus on the fact that there are 20,000 pages and it's insane. But the legwork probably to get someone to share those documents with you was probably its own saga. To the extent you can talk about it, tell us. Yeah. I mean, I can talk about it in the generic sort of way of how I tend to approach these. Like once I knew this existed and I knew that it was classified, I sort of mapped out like, okay, who has access to this? Or who can give me access to this? Who either has literally got it locked up in their office or is on top of the guy who has it locked up in their office. How did you know even that it existed? Did you? Was that? The family had told me there was a case file. And then in talking to the government, they acknowledged like, yes, there's a case file, but it's classified and you can touch it because it's an ongoing investigation, blah, blah, blah. And so it was kind of this, I call it encircling the victim. And it's sort of like finding the individual that I need to do what I need them to do in a journalistic sense. And then talking, and again, this is always like some powerful politician or individual who has a reason that I don't necessarily think is legitimate for keeping this information hidden from the public. And it's about finding all the people around them that can influence them. So whether it's like talking to them about what I know because I know they're going to go to that source and be like, oh man, the New York Times is asking about this. Or building relationships and friendships or whatever source relationships with the individuals who can then exert influence. So that was the matrix. The individual who ultimately leaked this to me had several political patrons and it turned out that above them, I had a few different individuals who I'd known for a long time, they knew my work and who helped out on my behalf, sort of like creating those inroads. And so it was a month's long process of like getting closer and closer to that source until someone basically told the individual like, yeah, I just give it to them. And so I was able to then, I mean, even the logistics of getting 20,000 pages from Tamalipa's house in Mexico City was like a nightmare. I got it sent via the Mexican equivalent of DHL which is a company called Esta Feta, which is like, it's not a super efficient operation. So they actually lost some of the boxes. These like documents I'd spent. So like talking about like a pen drive, we're talking about like boxes. Nobody gave me a digital copy. Photo copy, everything. And then they sent them in these like cardboard boxes and suddenly I get them and I'm like, wait, I'm missing like a third of this. And like then another month of like calling Esta Feta being like, you have to find these boxes. And so someone like wandering around one of their warehouses is like, oh, here they are. The reason, we didn't put them on the shipments because the boxes broke open. And I'm like, oh man. And then they finally sent it to me and thankfully everything was intact. But every chain of logistics was a challenge. You can't discreetly pass 20,000 documents to someone. I thought like, all right, look, if it's like a handoff of like a thumb drive, fine. But right, we're talking about a major logistical operation here. Yeah. You're saying for the kind of journal nerds out there, myself included. So you're saying essentially like, to tell us like from the moment you find out that this case file exists to the moment you get the packet, the first of the packages. Now, just give us a rough sense. Are we talking about months? Months, I mean, months for sure. Probably like four or five months, but that process was expedited when I realized that one of the political patrons of the individual I needed to get me access to these documents I knew and had a relationship with. And if I hadn't spent the previous six years as bureau chief by Mexico building those networks, I would have never, I mean, I just would have never known who to go to or had the credibility to go to them or a relationship that I could leverage to kind of get convinced someone to do something that ultimately like, I think was the right thing to do, right? Like, I mean, I'm not asking for them to leak things that are against the public interest. You know, this is an opportunity to kind of really show an unvarnished look of the ruin of Mexico's drug war. And yeah, but it took months. It doesn't mean it for them. I mean, it doesn't help them. I think zero percent wanted me to get that because it was going to make them look bad because every element of their ineptitude was on, you know, it was like looking at the case with X-ray vision in some ways. All of the times where like, I had the suspicion that the government just wasn't doing each job, I actually had hard evidence of it from these individuals who were saying it or documents they themselves were writing. You know, there's a moment where, you know, Miriam finds the name and the house of one of the primary suspects. It's the first break she has in the case. And she gives it to the government. She's like, please just go there and arrest them. Like, this is his name. You can issue an arrest warrant. And they sort of like slowly mope around about it. And her son had told me like, yeah, they just never did anything. And I was like, that can't be possible. How do they not do anything? And then I actually could document the paper trail of her sending in her calling in first off and someone having to diligently write down the call of like what she says and then sending in an actual sign sort of warrant saying, this guy lives here. I've know this and I know this. And then the month later when the government finally gets around to issuing the response to that saying, oh, we finally went there and he wasn't there anymore. But that wouldn't have existed without that paper. And obviously it makes the government look like what it is, which is sort of announced. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's incredible. It's incredible. I'm blown away by that. Let me just ask, so we've got time, I think for one more question. And there's one more question I want to be sure to pick off of the list, which is, someone asks, and to some degree, you've answered this just by virtue of telling the full story of the book and of your relationship with Miriam's family. But obviously, sadly, she's far from the only mother who's had to fight to get answers about the whereabouts of her disappeared child. How did you decide that she was the person for you? Again, tragically, there are probably too many people you could choose from as the potential protagonist here. I just wanted to make sure that that question got addressed as well, because it's on our, it's on our list. Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's about, it's also about like how we decide what narratives we choose when there's a sea of tragedy that we can wait in and potentially drown ourselves and our readers and I've spent basically the entire time that I lived in Mexico, deeply focused and moved by the cause of the disappeared. I wrote a story relatively early on in my time as bureau chief about this couple who had fallen in love looking for their missing children. They were part of the same collective, their children had disappeared on the same day and they ultimately like, they could only understand one another and that had kind of precipitated this love story, kind of born of this deep, you know, wrecking force of a disappearance. And from that point, I kind of knew there is, there's nothing worse than writing about a true human tragedy than honestly boring readers with it or by like just shoving the worthiness of it down their throats. Like I care deeply about poverty, but like please do not ask me to read some uninteresting, not compelling story on poverty because it makes people care less. It makes people think they already know what's going on and kind of, you know, turn off. And I think things like the disappeared are too important to allow readers and policymakers to do that. And so my strategy was to find stories that, again, that allowed readers to go along with you, to be in this place, to identify with a character. I mean, to the distinction about Miriam is that like she didn't just look for her daughter, she looked for the people responsible, which was, you know, she knew this and even acknowledged it as a suicide mission. But that testament to the love that she felt and the corresponding loss when her daughter disappeared that she didn't care that she had other kids or, you know, a family to take care of. She just, she said, you know, I died the moment they took my daughter. I think that was just so moving to me. And I felt like if I can get people to care about her and her story, I can get them to care about 100,000 other disappeared and maybe the 350,000 dead in this war on drugs. Maybe I can get them to rethink the way that like American policy shapes the drug war in the United States and kind of pushes the Mexicans to take this violence, to meet violence response that is obviously desperately failed. So choosing her was just finding a story that would move people, that would shake them from their complacency, Mexicans themselves from this normalization of violence and have them invest even just 10 minutes to read the story and to feel something about a narrative that has grown so numb and familiar. Yeah. And what you're describing, I mean, apart from being a societal problem and a political problem and a humanitarian problem is, you know, in the context of a book or in the context of a piece of journalism, it's a narrative problem. Like the fact that people are so desensitized to the sort of the general plot points of this kind of story because it's so common that you're looking against that grain. You're working against the grain of someone's inattention as a reader who's thinking, right, right. Yeah, I understand. I kind of have a sense of like the rough contours of this tragedy. And so you're trying to kind of claw your way into their mind and soul. And to do that, it requires this kind of gritty journalistic work. No, it's so true. I think everybody probably listening is a journalist who's faced that same problem. Like, how do I find a narrative that can break through the noise? It's so hard. And if you care so much about these issues, I find that like just finding the right vehicle takes as long as like once you've found it actually gathering the story. You know, to tell a story, you talk to hundreds of people before you find one that really you feel like can carry the magnitude of what you're hoping to say. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfect note to end on. Regrettably, we have to end. Zom, congratulations on your book. It's absolutely incredible. Everyone, please go out and get this book. It'll blow you away. Thanks for tuning in and congratulations again. Thanks everybody for showing up and Jonathan once again. Thank you for the kind words and for reading it and for taking an hour out of your busy schedule to do this. Of course, it's my absolute pleasure. All right. Take care, guys.