La Linea

Julian Cardona

Among the scrub brush and rolling sand dunes where townspeople once rode horses, Mexican officials made a grisly discovery in the Juarez Valley in November. They uncovered 15 shallow graves near an unfinished house on “La Colorada” ranch in Ejido Jesus Carranza. In those desert graves lay 20 bodies, which officials estimate may have been there since 2010—the height of the bloody war between the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels (see “The Deadliest Place in Mexico”).

“They say those graves belong to El Diego,” said Gustavo de la Rosa, the Chihuahua human-rights ombudsman. De la Rosa lived just two miles from the ranch but fled to Juarez in 2009 because of threats from the military, which was patrolling the Juarez Valley at the time.

“El Diego” is Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez, a notorious leader of La Linea, enforcers for the Juarez Cartel. A former cop, El Diego was arrested in July and extradited to the United States. Mexican officials say he ordered the deaths of at least 1,500 people, including two U.S. citizens linked to the U.S. consulate in Juarez. El Diego also allegedly gave the order to massacre students at a birthday party in Juarez’s Villas de Salvarcar neighborhood.

It was U.S. authorities who tipped off Mexican officials to the location of the clandestine cemetery just three miles from the Rio Grande and Texas. An examination of the remains found that the victims were shot, strangled or beaten. Their ages ranged from 18 to 40. Most appeared to be male, said Jorge Enrique Gonzalez Nicolas, regional state prosecutor, in a press conference afterward. “The next step is to begin the process of identifying their bodies,” he said, according to the El Paso Times.

There will undoubtedly be more gravesites, said de la Rosa. “We have so many missing and so many dead, there must be graves all over the valley.”

There was a military checkpoint on the road leading to La Colorada. “Many of those dead probably came from Juarez, so they had to pass through that checkpoint,” de la Rosa said. “I never heard of anyone being detained for transporting a body.”

Two years ago, Juan Fraire Escobedo sought political asylum in Texas after the assassination of his mother Marisela Escobedo and the murder of his 16-year old sister Rubi.

Marisela was shot and killed December 16, 2010, on the steps of the Chihuahua State Capitol where she was holding a vigil to bring her daughter Rubi’s killer to justice. Government authorities had refused to help the family even after Rubi’s former boyfriend, Sergio Barraza, confessed to killing her.

The family was forced to conduct their own investigation. Through sheer persistence they found Barraza in the state of Zacatecas and located Rubi’s partial remains. Meanwhile, his sister’s killer had joined the Zetas drug cartel, which runs Zacatecas. “We went to the chief of the federal police in Mexico City, and he told us ‘he’s with the Zetas. We can’t do anything.’”

Escobedo’s dogged pursuit of justice made him a target of death threats. More than the cartels, Escobedo blames a corrupt government system that allows organized crime to flourish. Nearly two years after his mother’s death, Escobedo joined at least a dozen other activists in Austin Thursday to protest in front of the Mexican Consulate against impunity and corruption in his homeland.

“After years and years of corruption in the government it’s difficult to get any justice in Mexico, especially because of the security situation,” he said Thursday. “And here in exile it’s like I don’t exist to my country.”

As more Mexicans like Escobedo seek refuge here a protest movement is building in Texas to exert pressure on Mexico. “We’re tired of living with the violence,” he said.

Escobedo, is a member of Mexicanos en Exilio a nonprofit composed of exiles who have fled Mexico. The nonprofit was started by El Paso immigration attorney Carlos Spector to bring attention to human rights abuses in Mexico. His daughter Alejandra helped organize the protest Thursday.

Protestors said they have little faith that Mexico’s new president Enrique Peña Nieto will combat the corruption and respect the rule of law. On December 1^st during his inauguration in Mexico City dozens of protestors were arbitrarily detained and some were tortured, according to a preliminary report by Mexico City’s human rights commission. Some of the protestors are still being held in detention.

“Injustice moves me to come here today,” said 60-year old Angel Camaño who is originally from Guadalajara. “People try to protest in Mexico and they are being put in jail. The politicians talk about democracy and liberty but we don’t see it.”

Jen Reel

Latricia Jones and her son walking in their neighborhood next to the Koch's Corpus Christi refinery

In October, while finishing up my story “Kochworld” on oil refineries in Corpus Christi owned by billionaires Charles and David Koch I received an invitation to participate in a journalism conference in Lubbock, held by the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), the nation’s oldest and most venerable journalism organization for reporters who cover the environment.

I was happy to have been invited. Hundreds of environmental journalists were attending the conference which would be hosted by Texas Tech University. Some reporters had come from as far away as Europe and Latin America.

But first I’d have to finish my story. All I needed were the comments I was waiting on from Koch Industries. Imagine my surprise when I get an email back from Koch Industries’ spokesperson Katie Stavinoha: “I am working on it. Have been at a SEJ deal.”

My first thought was, “What’s Koch Industries doing at a conference filled with environmental reporters?”

Turns out Koch Industries was a sponsor. The SEJ and Koch struck me as an odd match. Not only are the Koch brothers top spenders on global-warming-denial organizations and Washington lobbyists, they also publicly attack reporters, on their web site KochFacts.com, who criticize their environmental record and business practices, and publish Internet ads on high traffic sites attacking reporters. (I would soon be subjected to this treatment.)

I probably wouldn’t have ever known the Kochs were sponsoring the conference if I hadn’t gotten that email from their public information officer. You’d be hard pressed to figure it out in the SEJ program. On page 33 of the 34-page conference booklet was a list of “generous contributors that made it possible for Texas Tech University to host the conference.”

Toward the end of that sponsor list was Matador Ranch. But no mention that the 130,000-acre ranch is owned and operated by Koch Agriculture Company, a subsidiary of Koch Industries. The ranch has hunting and deer breeding operations, as well as commercial and registered cattle, and Quarter horses.

The conference schedule included a tour of Matador Ranch to discuss conservation practices and “creative ways to find water,” according to the conference booklet.   Nowhere in the description of the tour did it say the ranch was owned by Koch Industries or that the Koch brothers would be paying for a lunch for the environmental reporters on the tour. The only inkling was that one of the speakers listed was Jim Mahoney, executive vice president for operations and compliance at Koch Industries. (Checking online the SEJ schedule now mentions the Kochs own the ranch. I’m not sure when SEJ made this change to the tour description. I downloaded my program on October 18th and there was no mention.)

At the conference in Lubbock, I ran into longtime environmental advocate Tom “Smitty” Smith, executive director at the nonprofit Public Citizen’s Texas office, who had been invited to speak on a panel about a “clean” coal plant in Odessa. I asked whether he knew that Koch Industries was a conference sponsor. Smith was as surprised as I was. I also spoke with Houston environmental activist Bryan Parras, who was speaking on a panel about environmental injustice at the conference. He had no idea either.

I brought this up with Beth Parke, executive director of the SEJ while I was in Lubbock in October then again by phone last week. Parke arranges the agreements with hosting universities. Her duties include the implementation of board policies, strategic planning for the conferences, and budget and finance.

I raised the issue of Koch Industries environmental record and their aggressive treatment of reporters who write critically about their operations. In November, after my story “Kochworld” came out I experienced the wrath of Koch Industries firsthand. The company ran ads against me and The Texas Observer on Google and the Poynter media web site saying that we were “dishonest” and “deceptive” among other things.

So, my question to Parke was why does SEJ have a polluting company that publicly attacks journalists sponsoring its conference?

Parke said that SEJ had an agreement with Texas Tech, and it was the university that had raised the money from those sponsors to host the conference. This agreement was a “firewall,” she said, between the sponsors and the SEJ.  “We don’t feel it’s our job to tell them [Texas Tech] who can or cannot give money. I don’t even want to know how the sausage was made honestly,” Parke said. “My job is get the agreements with the institutions and let them fill that account however they can.”

Texas Tech gave the SEJ about $150,000 for catering and other event planning for the five-day conference. Parke said on average the sponsors gave between $5,000 to $7,000. As far as she knows, she said, the Kochs only spent $600 on lunches for everyone who attended the tour of their Matador Ranch. She said she didn’t know why the ranch was chosen as a tour site for the conference.

“The lunch thing is like, OK it’s $600,” she said. “Is it really worth the hassle of us trying to find another way to cover the lunches?… It seems a little abstract.”

But it wasn’t abstract for a lot of environmentalists and reporters who have dealt with Koch Industries. “Anytime sponsorship comes along there are all kinds of conditions and requests for special treatment that go along with that,” Tom “Smitty” Smith said.

Parke said there was no such special treatment at the conference. “We draw the line very clearly. If someone wants to be present at the conference they should buy an exhibit table. What we don’t sell is influence, and we’re very clear about that to the universities too, and we have to push back sometimes.”

Smitty brought up the other  SEJ conference sponsor he found problematic—Waste Control Specialists (WCS)—that operates a massive radioactive waste dump in West Texas. The dump and the company is owned by Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons. Kent Hance, chancellor of Texas Tech, has a financial interest in the dump and is the company’s former lobbyist. A tour was arranged for journalists to visit the radioactive waste site. But nowhere was there any information about Hance’s role in the company, or an opposing perspective on the panel of the tour, Smitty said.

Karen Hadden, executive director of the environmental group Sustainable Energy and Economic Development Coalition, or SEED, was dismayed to see a tour for out-of-state journalists to the WCS radioactive dump with few if any opponents included on the tour. Hadden is a longtime, vocal opponent of WCS.

When Hadden approached SEJ about her concerns they invited her to ride along on the bus and go on the tour. But WCS said Hadden could not go on the tour, though the company did allow someone from Sierra Club to tour the site. “I heard (WCS) said I would be too disruptive,” she says. “Which means I would ask questions that they didn’t want to answer.”

So Hadden asked if she could ride along on the three-hour bus ride and stay on the bus while the reporters toured the radioactive waste dump. WCS said, “no” to that as well, Hadden said.

“It was kind of a shock to be told I couldn’t go,” she said. Hadden added that in the end, she rode part of the way on the bus so she could give her perspective to the reporters. “I had to get off the bus halfway there,” she said. “ I had to arrange for somebody to follow the bus and pick me up.”

“What did the reporters say when the bus stopped in the middle of nowhere and you got off?” I asked.

Hadden laughed. “One of the reporters asked. And an organizer of the tour said ‘they don’t want her there’. The reporters quickly understood. But I am very thankful that the reporters let me ride along on the bus.”

SEJ’s Beth Parke said she wasn’t sure what happened with Hadden and the WCS tour. “I heard that it might have been an ID issue. She didn’t do what other people did in time to get clearance.”

Parke said they’ve had many critical journalists lead industry tours during the conferences. “We had a situation with Abrahm Lustgarten from ProPublica who isn’t a favorite person of the fracking industry leading that tour.”

At the end of our conversation. Parke conceded that she could see how reporters should have known the Koch Brothers would be picking up the tab for lunches before arriving at their remote Matador Ranch. “I appreciate what you’re saying, and we probably should have told people. We’ll put it under advisement for the future,” she said.

It’s not easy funding a five-day conference every year, especially in the age of downsizing media organizations, she said. “Our members want the ethics, but they don’t want to pay for that.  If you wanted to go to a conference totally paid for by journalists and organized by journalists it would be $850 per registrant … and people just won’t pay that and so it comes down to a devil’s bargain. And the universities are over that same kind of barrel trying to educate people and keep their institutions afloat,” Parke said. “They end up in some tricky places… It’s just hard for us to police every relationship we make and get entangled with in these conferences. But we’ll do what we can do.”

Photo courtesy Fox News

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales during a Sept. 27, 2011, appearance on Fox News to discuss his border-violence report.

Before retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert Scales even stepped up to the podium, it was clear he was in a combative mood. Scales was in Austin in early November as an invited speaker for a security summit at the University of Texas at Austin’s Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. “Get ready, y’all are going to get it,” a law enforcement official warned me and another reporter in the auditorium. He looked supremely amused.

Scales, who has the pugnacious face of a retired boxer, didn’t disappoint. “The media has utterly failed in covering the border,” the general said, though, oddly, he excepted Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren from his indictment. Scales also excoriated the federal government and “all those three-letter agencies that are cooking the books and hiding the truth” for their failure to secure the southern border.

It turned out Scales was still smarting from criticism he received last year from both Texas congressmen and the media after releasing his report “Texas Border Security: A Strategic Military Assessment,” which he’d co-written with retired Army General Barry McCaffrey, drug czar under President Bill Clinton.

“We wrote a report last year and had our coming-out party at the [Texas] Capitol, but the media chose to eviscerate us,” he said. “I wish they’d read the report.”

Many of us had read the report—all 59 pages of it. It struck many as heavy on inflammatory rhetoric and light on evidence. It argued that “narco-terrorists” are turning Texas border counties into “sanitized tactical zones,” and that living on the border is “tantamount to living in a war zone in which civil authorities, law enforcement agencies as well as citizens are under attack around the clock.”

The report was commissioned by Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples and Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw. They’re among the many Texas Republican officials who increasingly equate the war on drugs with the war on terror, a conflation that helps trigger not only more federal spending but more military intervention along the border.

Many border residents, including congressmen Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, and Silvestre Reyes, D-El Paso, didn’t like having their hometowns characterized as war zones. In a heated congressional committee meeting last year, the congressmen strongly criticized the generals’ report as based on anecdotal evidence and as politically motivated. They grilled the generals about how much they’d been paid ($80,000) and where they’d gotten their information.

A year later at the security summit in Austin, Scales was still upset. The worst thing, he said, was that he had invited his wife to the congressional hearing, telling her it would be a low-key affair. “It was an ambush,” he said. “In all my years of military service I had never been so humiliated. My wife wanted to kill Cuellar.”

Scales said he stands by the report, in which he linked Mexican cartels to terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. “If you think it’s just crime and not terrorism, you’re just fooling yourself,” he said. Asked to describe specific incidences of the cartel-terrorism nexus he said, “It’s an existential ideology … the flow of narco money tied together by criminal enterprise, kidnapping, white slavery and other horrible criminal acts.”

The bottom line is this, he said: “The people guarding the border have been poorly chosen and poorly trained, and they have ridiculous rules of engagement. The FBI are notorious for cooking the books. The [crime] numbers are probably half of what it is. The terrorists have gone retail and are in our major cities—it will take generations to root them out.”

With that, General Scales sat down, a sour expression on his face. Next up was Greg Thrash from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. “I hope we’re not one of those three-letter agencies you were referring to,” he chuckled. Scales stood up with his briefcase and headed toward the exit. “I hope it’s not something I said,” Thrash quipped.

“Gotta catch a plane,” Scales shrugged, walking out.

After the general had left, Thrash said his agency hadn’t seen any of the border-violence spillover mentioned in Scales’ report. “From our offices along the border, we don’t see any evidence of any massive spillover,” he said. “Our cases don’t support that.”