Speaker

TC in

TC out

Text

Voice Over

00:00:39

00:00:43

It’s a long, dark walk under the streets of Nogales, Mexico.

Voice Over

00:00:46

00:00:56

These drainage tunnels prevent seasonal rains from flooding the streets above. They also allow human and drug traffickers underground access from Mexico into the United States.

Voice Over

00:01:00

00:01:07

It’s not the kind of place you want to go for an afternoon stroll. Not without a police escort, and lots of guns.

Grillo

00:01:10

00:01:15

Cuanto, desde este punto hasta el otro lado? Cuando tiempo es? Cuanta distancia es?

(From this point to the other (US) side, how much distance is that?)

Comandante

00:01:16

00:01:19

Yo creo, la pared es …

I think, the wall is …

Grillo

00:01:19

00:02:06

OK. So this is pretty amazing here. You got this uh, so this is uh, the comandante is showing us this is another tunnel … which is being found, filled in with concrete. Now actually this line is almost the border into the United States. Like right through here is the United States. We’re right up on the border here. Under ground. So they made this tunnel from here, and just take drugs right into the United States. Have someone go down that side. Now this concrete, you can see was like poured in by the Border Patrol. The BP there stands for Border Patrol. They reckon the Border Patrol found it. So they poured in concrete from the United States side, just poured it down and, you know, filled it up here.

Gentile

00:02:07

00:02:15

And they had to have some cooperation here from the Mexican authorities, I think, because apparently they put a piece of something here to block this concrete as it came down to stop it.

Gentile

00:02:17

00:02:19

…so there’s coordination between the two countries.

Voice Over

00:02:21

00:02:58

Ioan Grillo is a freelance journalist working for outlets including the New York Times, and Time magazine. He’s not staff. Freelance means he proposes stories to media outlets and they either buy his work – or not. or, an outlet contacts him to request his coverage on some issue or event. Grillo is one member of a new generation of freelance journalists increasingly filling the void left by mainstream media retreating from news coverage abroad. As corporate media close bureaus and cut staff around the world, it’s freelancers who take their place.

Grillo

00:03:01

00:03:17

OK. So this is a drainage tunnel from the United States that goes into Mexico. Now the issue is, is you have in this area, one city which crosses the border. However, drug smugglers would use these to smuggle drugs into the United States.

Grillo

00:03:19

00:03:24

It smells pretty funky down here right now. Hee hee. This area is also used for sewage.

Voice Over

00:03:25

00:03:42

Grillo has covered drug trafficking in Mexico for 15 years. But even he didn’t fully understand the impact of this border on the lives of people living in its shadow. We’ll follow him as he reveals those hidden stories on both sides of this frontier.

Grillo

00:03:44

00:03:57

Wow. You can see a pretty long tunnel going right into the United States. You can see something else, there are kind of holes in there. You can see there’s something else which is a way to potentially move drugs.

Voice Over

00:03:59

00:04:20

Photojournalist Patrick Tombola is based in Venice, Italy. He’s making photos which he’ll try to sell to The New York Times. Like Grillo, Tombola is a dedicated, determined and tech-savvy professional putting everything on the line to live life his way. His last job with Grillo was this story on El Salvador for Time magazine.

Grillo

00:04:31

00:02:29

You’ve got two metal gates and you’ve got a lighted area and you’ve got some very extensive equipment here.

Voice Over

00:04:37

00:04:52

Grillo and Tombola are here to bring us the information we need to make crucial decisions about our lives and the world we live in. It’s important to understand who these journalists are and how they work. the places they take us, and the people we meet.

Grillo

00:04:53

00:04:57

This is some kind of defense so you couldn’t just drill up from here into the United States.

Gentile

00:04:59

00:05:22

The United States begins there. En esta linea aqui…Now, I’m in Mexico. This is the line separating the two countries. And now I can step back into the United States. Just like that. Increible. Increible.

Gentile

00:05:41

00:05:44

Perdon, la marcha va para alla, no?

Unidentified woman

00:05:44

00:05:43

Si.

Gentile

00:05:45

00:05:47

No has visto a Gerardo Carrillo?

Unidentifiedwoman

00:05:47

00:05:47

No.

Voice Over

00:05:49

00:05:59

Mexico is where I started my career, right out of graduate school. It was here that I began working as a freelance foreign correspondent forty years ago.

Voice Over

00:05:59

00:06:22

And I’m looking for Gerardo Carrillo, a friend and colleague from my days of covering Mexico and Central America for United Press International and Newsweek magazine. Like me, Carrillo started out as a freelancer. He later founded the video unit for the Associated Press in Mexico. Today he’s a critical link between freelancers like myself, and stories on the ground.

Gentile

00:06:14

00:06:15

Gerardo.

Gentile

00:06:21

00:06:22

Que tal?

Gentile

00:06:25

0:06:26

Todo bien?

Carrillo

00:06:26

00:06:27

Todo perfecto.

Voice Over

00:06:28

00:06:48

Carrillo can cover this march as a one-man band, or what I call, a backpack journalist, because of technology. Instead of the larger, more expensive cameras he used to lug around in the 1980s, he now uses gear that is smaller,  lighter and cheaper. And he can do the job himself, without assistants.

Gentile

00:06:50

00:07:24

The people behind me, these journalists, this is the grassroots level of journalism in places like Mexico, and I would venture to say, in a lot of places around Latin America. They are young. They are idealistic. They are hard-working. They are probably underpaid, under-protected, not well supported  by their employers. I don’t know how many are freelancers or full timers. These are the kind of people who get out there, this is where the news, the information begins to flow from. From people who are doing stuff like this. At the very, very bottom level of news and information gathering.

Voice Over

00:07:25

00:07:41

V.O. It’s not just technology that’s changed here. So has Mexico. The country has mutated from a generally peaceful place, to a violent, lethal place where el narco, or, drug traffickers, are engaged in what some call, an insurgency.

Voice Over

00:07:42

00:07:51

Experts say at least a 175,000 people have died in Mexico’s decade-old drug war. Another 28,000 have disappeared.

Voice Over

00:07:52

00:08:09

Caught in the jaws of this carnage are the journalists who cover it. Today, Mexico is one of the worst countries in the world to be a journalist. More than 100 journalists have been murdered here since the year 2000. Twenty-five others have disappeared and are presumed dead.

Voice Over

00:08:12

00:08:36

Of all the journalists killed in Mexico’s drug war, none is a foreigner. All are Mexican. Perhaps the narcos understand that killing a foreign journalist might be bad for business. Whenever things get too hot for foreign journalists like me, we can run to the airport, whip out a foreign passport, and head home. But Mexican journalists can’t do that. Because they already are home.

Voice Over

00:08:37

00:08:51

On a laptop computer, Carrillo edits his video of this women’s rights march before transmitting the material to the Associated Press in Washington. This was unthinkable when I first came to this country in 1977.

Voice Over

00:08:54

00:09:10

As I watch Carrillo toil away at his craft, I’m reminded how much freelancers like me depend on people like him. For the work they do at the grassroots level of journalism. For the guidance they provide about navigating their country and their people.

Voice Over

00:10:07

00:10:26

This man’s story is all-too-common in Mexico. About twice as many women die during child birth in Mexico as in the United States. And the U.S. has the worst rate of maternal mortality in the developed world. The numbers for infant mortality in Mexico are just as bad.

Voice Over

00:10:27

00:10:31

Janet Jarman wants to help change that -- by making a documentary film.

Jarman

00:10:35

00:10:59

I’m really interested in medicine and public health, and ancient traditions about health. And I wanted to do a project that really showed how you could blend traditional culture and modern medicine today and that’s how I got really interested in midwives mostly as a way to tell this story because the midwives are often right in the middle of this debate.

Voice Over

00:11:01

00:11:09

Her film explores conflicting visions between midwives and medical professionals about how to provide a safe and dignified childbirth experience for women.

Voice Over

00:11:20

00:11:35

I followed Jarman to the violent state of Guerrero, one of the locations where she’s shooting her documentary. She’s been working on the film for over a year. Like many other freelancers working on documentary projects, her film is funded by a major grant.

Jarman

00:11:36

00:12:09

So I put together a big proposal and thought about what is the complete story here and how could I make a difference with this topic in the lives of women and families. Um, and I applied for the grant and they gave it to me. And I remember sitting on my sofa reading that email that day and thinking, ‘Wow! This is really going to happen!’ And I’m just so grateful for this opportunity to be able to do a story with this much depth.

Voice Over

00:12:10

00:12:13

On the road to Guerrero I asked her what it takes to be a freelancer.

Jarman

00:12:14

00:12:39

I think if you’re a freelance you need to have a really supportive home team or, you know, personal life, people in your personal life who will support this lifestyle. And then you make personal choices of how you want to live and, you know, what you want to commit to in your life and what kind of compromises you want to make.

Voice Over

00:12:49

00:13:00

If Gerardo Carrillo is part of the technology revolution that’s changing the tools of our craft, Janet Jarman is part of the gender revolution that’s changing the faces of our craft.

Voice Over

00:13:03

00:13:16

She started out as a photographer for the Miami Herald, but left to take a Master’s Degree, then became a freelancer. Like so many photojournalists enabled by technology, she began to work in video.

Voice Over

00:13:18

00:13:25

Foreign correspondence once was a field dominated by white, middle and upper-class men. That’s no longer the case.

Voice Over

00:13:38

00:14:05

Guerrero is long considered one of Mexico’s most violent states. It’s especially known for violence against women, who often show up dead in the street. Or they just disappear. So working here, sometimes at night, with an all-female team, on a story about women, really put me on edge.

Voice Over

00:14:13

00:14:23

Jarman and her team have spent the night in this hospital, where some women elect to give birth with a midwife – but with backup support of hospital staff in case of emergency.

Jarman

00:14:24

00:15:13

The birth was beautiful. It was very gentle. The pictures I have of the husband and wife, and how she’s holding him and using him for support, and holding hands. I mean there were so many touching moments. And what was fascinating was why she chose this. Because when they come to this hospital the model is, the women can choose, if she wants an institutional birth or if she wants to come to this section of the hospital. And this woman had had an institutional birth for her first child and she said that she felt very lonely. And this time she thought she could have her husband in the room with her. And that really meant a lot to her. And you could see it.

Voice Over

00:15:14

00:15:22

Her current project may be about the specific issue of childbirth, but overall her work is about giving voice and face to the people of Mexico.

Jarman

00:15:23

00:15:44

Mostly I want people to have a connection with the subject. I want them to walk away feeling like maybe they understand a person better. Or on a very deep, human level. That people are not statistics. That they are real people with similar problems, same emotions, basically the same human experience.

Voice Over

00:15:45

00:15:59

Despite the difficulties and the dangers of their craft, freelance foreign correspondents like Jarman are driven by a deep sense of purpose. If there’s a single thread that binds, or defines them all, it’s the need to make a difference.

Voice Over

00:16:01

00:16:15

Back in Nogales with Ioan Grillo and his fixer Milton Martinez, we explore the border fence with the United States. Things get a bit sketchy here -- especially at night.

Grillo

00:16:16

00:16:20

Ay, do the reporters here follow the killings in Nogales?

Martinez

00:16:21

00:16:24

Yes, there are a lot of killings.

Grillo

00:16:25

00:16:28

Are there still a lot of executions?”

Martinez

00:16:29

00:16:32

Yes, here in the city the executions have never stopped.

Voice Over

00:16:41

00:17:02

We pulled up to a place along the border where U.S. officials – that’s the United States on the other side of this fence – have set up a powerful light. Milton says this area of the border is a hot zone for trafficking drugs and people.

Gentile

00:17:04

00:17:06

What are these lights for, Ioan?”

Grillo

00:17:08

00:17:36

This is a light from the U.S. side of the border, to show people, so you can see clearly if someone’s crossing, if someone climbs over the fence or tries to drill a hole or run into the United States, then people can see it, with lights showing, so you can’t hide under the cover of darkness.

Martinez

00:17:40

00:17:55

This is the way the U.S. government shows its power, because it used to be a very quiet city. You remember? It used to be just one city. It was a brotherhood.

Voice Over

00:17:56

00:18:04

Ioan spots a group of men on our side of the border. They’re watching us. They don’t look friendly. We’re careful not to point the camera in their direction.

Grillo

00:18:05

00:18:59

So what we came across here is a bunch of vehicles. Three, two big trucks. One car right behind where the camera is. And some guys look like they were trying to check out getting over the fence. They look like they might have some merchandize. Maybe drugs in the car. And the reason they stopped here, one of the guys wanted to check us out. Seeing who we are. They could probably recognize we are journalists. They see we’re talking to a camera. This varies in different parts of the border. How they’re gonna react to you.  In Nogales it’s more of a chilled area. They’re less likely to be violent right away. In other parts of Mexico they could be more aggressive a lot faster.

Voice Over

00:19:00

00:19:19

Milton is a classic example of what journalists call, a fixer. He was born and raised here. He’s a reporter for a Mexican magazine. His other job is making life easier – and safer -- for people like Ioan Grillo and me. Here, he advises on what to do as we’re being watched.

Martinez

00:19:20

00:19:22

In the sicario style, they don’t respect anything.

Gentile

00:19:23

00:19:50

What’s fascinating to me and alarming to me is that everybody here, every Mexican here understanding what’s happening when three big vehicles like this pull up next to the fence and, everybody knows that all this is going on. You know, the drug trafficking, the jumping over the walls, the danger that exists from these dark forces. And they live with that every day. And it seems to be inescapable. In some places in the country.

Grillo

00:19:51

00:21:19

Yeah, I think so, yeah. You’ve got the force of an industry, the pull of money. So why are those guys a few meters from us right now? Why they’re there. They’re doing their job. Now, their job is trafficking drugs. But this, are economic forces behind it. So, the White House carries out a survey every year, or a report every year called, “what Americans spend on illegal drugs.” And that report estimates that Americans spend one hundred billion dollars every year on marijuana, heroin, cocaine and crystal meth. So when you have a hundred billion dollars of money, and a product from this side of the fence is worth so much and just by going to this side of the fence that product increases in value massively. I mean think about a kilo of cocaine. A kilo of cocaine in Colombia is bought for about two thousand dollars. When they get it over on this side, it’s worth about thirty thousand dollars for that kilo. So, you’re talking about for each dollar you invest, you get fifteen dollars back. And that’s a better business than most people are in. So that’s the force of money.

Grillo

00:21:24

00:21:27

Now that we left let’s see what these guys are doing. Are they back out the truck or in the truck?

Gentile

00:21:32

00:21:35

Yeah, I think you may want to keep the camera down when we go by.

Voice Over

00:21:38

00:21:47

Further down this street, Ioan explores this abandoned house, apparently used as a safe house by smugglers of drugs and human beings.

Gentile

00:21:49

00:21:50

What is this Ioan?

Grillo

00:21:51

00:22:15

So this is a house which is being seized by the Federal Attorney General’s office in Mexico. And they seized this house, and uh, this was a house which was seized because there was a tunnel going from this house under the border into the United States.

Gentile

00:22:16

00:22:17

That’s the United States right there.

Grillo

00:22:17

00:22:25

That’s the United States right there. This is a crossing, an urban crossing.

Voice Over

00:22:27

00:22:41

Grillo has written two highly acclaimed books on drug trafficking. Back in England, four of his friends died from drug use. So for him, this story is personal. and maybe that’s why his work is so powerful.

Grillo

00:22:42

00:22:44

It seems to be cleaned out pretty well.

Voice Over

00:22:45

00:22:57

He wasn’t always a freelancer. He actually worked a while for a global news service in Mexico. But he felt constrained. He wanted to cover the country his way. So he went back to freelancing.

Voice Over

00:23:23

00:23:42

Deported from the United States back to Mexico for reasons he didn’t specify, this young man said he makes more in one day of labor in the United States, than he does in one week in Mexico. That’s his wife on the other side of the fence – in the U.S. state of Arizona.

Voice Over

00:23:53

00:24:05

We followed Grillo to a shelter for migrants – mostly from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. They were either on their way into the United States – or were recently deported from the United States.

Voice Over

00:24:09

00:24:20

Patrick Tombola is what many young freelancers aspire to be. A successful photo and video documentarian, he specializes in Latin America, the Middle East and Europe.

Voice Over

00:24:21

00:24:28

He’s taken assignments from major newspapers and magazines around the world – sometimes at great personal risk.

Tombola

00:24:28

00:24:41

And then so all of a sudden they said, bam bam bam bam bam. And he, he got two, two on the back, on his back that killed him. And then even after he was lying down bleeding, the guy …

Voice Over

00:24:41

00:24:45

We crisscrossed the city gathering information.

Voice Over

00:24:46

00:24:49

And with Milton’s help, we interviewed the mayor of Nogales.

Voice Over

00:24:52

00:24:54

Then we headed back to the hotel.

Voice Over

00:25:44

00:26:01

Meghan Dhaliwal and Dominic Bracco embody the new breed of freelance foreign correspondent perhaps more than any others I met on this trip to Mexico. They are bound together, in part, by their sense of independence and entrepreneurship. They are free spirits.

Voice Over

00:26:01

00:26:05

She’s worked as a Mexico City-based photojournalist for two years.

Voice Over

00:26:06

00:26:08

He’s been here for seven.

Voice Over

00:26:09

00:26:17

Dominic found his place as a photojournalist in Mexico’s northern city of Juarez, where the drug war raged, and where thousands were killed.

Voice Over

00:26:19

00:26:28

I’ve covered conflict on and off since 1979, and I’ve seen some hard things. But even I found some of his work tough to look at.

Voice Over

00:26:30

00:26:47

I first met Dominic during his presentation at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, DC. Meghan used to work here. And Dominic has won grant money here. The Pulitzer Center is one of the non-profits supporting freelancers overseas.

Voice Over

00:26:53

00:27:02

Meghan and Dominic personify the idealistic freelancers of today, who have chosen life styles of purpose and meaning, despite hardship and risk.

Gentile

00:27:05

00:27:23

This is a pretty tenuous, a lot of people would think that being a freelancer anywhere in the world is a tenuous, tenuous existence. A lot of people just couldn’t do this. They need, you know, a nine to five. They need a steady paycheck every month or every two weeks. How do you negotiate that? I mean is that an important consideration for you guys?

Bracco

00:27:24

00:27:33

So, both of us grew up in households where our parents worked for themselves. Which I think is interesting. Because I never wanted to work for someone, really. I was raised with that. I think Meghan’s the same way.

Voice Over

00:27:35

00:27:43

Dominic was raised in south Texas, where his father owns a construction company. Meghan’s from New Jersey. Her mother is a commercial interior designer.

Bracco

00:27:44

00:28:05

It’s difficult. There’s a lot of competition, there’s a lot of great people and you have to be better and smarter to survive. And so, I think, as hard as you would have to work, to maintain that, in my mind, you know, it’s nice that you know that you’re doing it for yourself every day. To make it in this career you have to work your ass off, you know? And we work really, really hard.

Gentile

00:28:06

00:28:19

How do you negotiate that? You’re separated. Often. Sometimes. Whatever. And so you have to go out alone? As a couple, how does that work?

Dhaliwal

00:28:20

00:29:12

We’ve never known anything else. Like our whole relationship has been, our whole relationship actually, the coolest thing is like now we live together so we get to come home to the same place, which we work really hard together to make happy and safe and peaceful and have things that we both love in it. And so, I think we’ve just always been used to it and I mean you just sort of develop a way of communicating with each other, would you say that’s right? Like when you’re apart – that’s the beautiful thing about dating a photographer, is, they understand when I’m like, ‘I cannot talk right now but like I’m fine and I’m safe and it’s fine but I can’t talk to you right now, we’re in the middle of something but I love you and I’ll talk to you tonight when I get back to the hotel.

Bracco

00:29:13

00:29:19

Yeah, I think we give each other the space to check out when we’re gone. And then when you’re here you’re kind of expected to be here.

Dhaliwal

00:29:20

00:29:21

Kind of.

Bracco

00:29:21

00:29:22

Yeah. Yeah.

Dhaliwal

00:29:22

00:29:24

It…Yeah

Bracco

00:29:24

00:29:27

It’s a constant balance though, I mean it’s nothing perfect. Like we …

Dhaliwal

00:29:27

00:29:28

It’s not easy.

Bracco

00:29:28

00:29:29

No it’s not easy.

Gentile

00:29:29

00:29:31

Can you talk about that a little bit What do you give up and what do you get in return?

Dhaliwal

00:29:32

00:29:54

I think you give up some…you give up stability, in being a freelancer. You have this really flexible life but you also have this life that can change really fast, and I think, the word ‘suffers’ like ‘my family suffers’ is the wrong way to put that but I think my family misses me, and I know I miss my family a lot.

Gentile

00:29:54

00:29:57

So the instability kind of bothers you a bit but not enough to stop doing it.

Dhaliwal

00:29:57

00:30:10

Not enough to stop. And they’re proud of me and I’m really proud of myself. I think it’s worth it, and they are super supportive. My 87-year-old grandmother is like, ‘You go girl’. You know? So …

Bracco

00:30:12

00:30:21

It’s a demanding job because you’re… I mean there is no stability, right? The only stability that her and I have is each other.

Gentile

00:30:22

00:30:24

What do you get in return for this instability?

Bracco

00:30:24

00:30:25

You get …

Dhaliwal

00:30:26

00:30:27

The world?

Bracco

00:30:17

00:31:18

You get total freedom, I mean at the same time, like, it depends on where you are in your career, right? So, you go through different stages of a freelancer. There’s moments, you know like in any business, where things are going really well and, with that, comes a certain amount of stability, you know? If you have a good base of savings, then you have the ability to take control of your agenda, you know, and that’s why living cheaply is so important, you know. I think, if you’re keeping your overhead low, then that gives you the ability to save cash for moments when, you know,  you do want to spend time with your family or you do need to go on a vacation, or when you do get sick, ‘cause, that’s the other thing, you get sick and, you gotta work, you know?

Voice Over

00:31:20

00:31:33

When I saw this note on their refrigerator door, something resonated deep inside me. Perhaps because I’ve been through this test of fire. The challenges of living abroad, away from family, under constant stress.

Voice Over

00:31:34

00:31:58

It says:

“I love you to the moon and back down to the bottom of the sea.

I had the best month with you. I feel so lucky.

Thank you for being the kind, generous soul you are. I know things are hard right now. I promise they will get better. I will be here to support you always.

Have a great trip. See you on the 23^rd.

I love you.”

Gentile

00:32:06

00:33:09

Of all the interviews that we’ve done, I think this one has moved me the most. And I think it’s because it reminds me so much of … I recognize so much stuff there that I had gone through when I first came here. The excitement of all the possibilities of the future, I guess, the tenuous nature of what so many freelancers are doing, and the hope that they, that  and Meghan, inspire. You know? You just wish that everything turns out right for them. Friday afternoon traffic.

Gentile

00:33:11

00:33:16

Oh. Oh that was close.

Voice Over

00:33:42

00:31:49

And that’s how David Agren’s story began. He’s a freelance foreign correspondent who sells his work mostly to USAToday, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.

Gentile

00:33:54

00:33:55

So, where are we now?

Agren

00:33:56

00:34:45

We’re in Tultepec, or at least on the road to Tultepec, which is a city to the north of Mexico City and it’s known for fireworks. People here make fireworks, sell fireworks. People come here to buy fireworks and every once in a while the town goes BOOM.  Today is the end of the National Pyrotechnics Fair, so we’re going to witness the last, the last day, which should include what they call musical fireworks. So tonight what they’re going to do is, they figure because the big industry in town is fireworks, and the people are not going to stop making fireworks or selling fireworks, they figure the best way to honor the dead is with, well, more fireworks. By shooting off, you know, fifty kilograms of fireworks. So it should be a show.

Voice Over

00:34:46

00:34:55

The explosions and fire killed and wounded dozens of people. So three months after the tragedy, I accompanied David to follow up on the story.

Gentile

00:34:56

00:35:03

So you’re doing this story about this town where, just a few months ago, fireworks exploded and killed how many people?

Agren

00:35:04

00:35:05

Uh, forty-two.

Gentile

00:35:05

00:35:16

OK but for your readers, which is why I was asking you who your readers are, why is this important to them, what does it say, what are you getting at here, aside from, you know, the aftermath of a tragedy?

Agren

00:35:17

00:35:54

It seems like, after the event everybody’s sad for a little bit but then life goes on. There’s something very interesting about Mexico in that sense. So I think I’m capturing that sense of Mexican, I would say, in some ways resilience, in some ways stubbornness. That’s the positive way to describe it. I don’t know, and from the more negative you would also say this is an activity that perhaps has been carried on a little to loosy goosy for too long.

Gentile

00:35:55

00:35:57

This is incredible. This is a big God-damned operation.

Voice Over

00:36:07

00:36:30

As David and I toured this kaleidoscope of Mexico, I had to think hard about the lack of regulation and the acceptance of these deaths as just another fact of life. But I was reminded once again of the wonder of our craft: our ticket to participate in the global conversation. It’s the thrill and the gratification of this experience that has kept me active in the field for so long.

Voice Over

00:36:31

00:36:41

And here’s one of the downsides of journalism. You eat what you can when and where you can. Here, it’s churros, fried bread dough smothered in sugar!

Voice Over

00:36:46

00:36:54

Born in Canada, David first visited Mexico as an exchange student. He returned years later to take a job as a reporter.

Agren

00:36:55

00:37:10

The big thing is just to find reactions to the fact that this market blew up, that this town suffered a horrible tragedy, and the way they’re going to respond to that tragedy is to ignite more fireworks.

Voice Over

00:37:12

00:37:17

He’s an observer of the human condition, and goes about his work much like an anthropologist.

Agren

00:37:19

00:37:32

I just want to know what people are thinking. Why they would ever consider changing things, changing their practices, abandoning their businesses. That’s what I’d like to know.

Voice Over

00:37:43

00:37:54

After years of freelancing in Mexico, David says returning to Canada would be boring. You can see why.

Gentile

00:38:37

00:38:38

What’s the story behind this?

Dannemiller

00:38:38

00:39:14

This is one of those ones I was telling you about. When you see it, you go for it. And I didn’t think twice. This is Garibaldi, where the mariachis hang out. I got close to him and there’s that balance that you wanna get the photo but at the same time not necessarily intrude. There’s something going on there that speaks to, you know, how people relate to the environment, how they deal with elements, how they deal with things that they have in their hands. All that.

Gentile

00:39:15

00:39:17

At the end of the day he’s probably happy you made the photograph.

Dannemiller

00:39:18

00:39:19

I would, I would like to think so.

Gentile

00:39:20

00:39:21

It’s one of the things that keeps us doing what we do, isn’t it?

Dannemiller

00:39:22

00:39:23

Yeah, exactly.

Gentile

00:39:24

00:39:28

You have to feel a sense of a mission, that what we’re doing is important.

Voice Over

00:39:29

00:39:48

Keith Dannemiller is emblematic of the change affecting freelancers. He’s lived in Mexico since 1987. Once covering breaking news for major newspapers and magazines, Keith now makes his living largely by shooting for non-profits, documenting street life in Mexico City, and conducting photo workshops and guided tours.

Gentile

00:39:49

00:40:24

When you first came here, I mean, the situation, the journalism situation was very, very different, I think. At least that’s part of the premise of this whole endeavor of mine, about freelancers. You came down as a freelancer. I came to the region as a freelancer. There were dozens, if not scores of journalists here from different countries. Once the conflicts began in Central America, there were hundreds of journalists, many of them freelancers, and real bureaus all through the region. Can you talk about the difference between then and now, what that all looks like now?

Dannemiller

00:40:26

00:41:05

The difference between then and now, I mean, I don’t know, I couldn’t count how many newspapers and magazines, but it was, sort of, obviously the big magazines, the big newspapers, second level, third level. You know, newspapers that had offices here. So there were a lot of people to make contact with. There were a lot of possibilities here to do freelance work at that point. Today, hoy en dia, forget it. So that situation, vis a vi, correspondents and fixed offices and relationship to the home offices, has changed drastically.

Gentile

00:41:05

00:41:07

How do people get news now out of Mexico, where does it come from?

Dannemiller

00:41:08

00:41:27

There are possibilities, and yes, obviously The New York Times, the Washington Post, still need photos, and there are people that can do things, but the sheer number of possible points of contact and work has dropped drastically.

Gentile

00:41:27

00:41:34

You don’t really do a lot of the news assignments anymore. Can you talk about what you do now? You’re still a photographer.

Dannemiller

00:41:35

0:42:25

I’m still a photographer. That continues to today, 30 years later. I’m still photographing here on the streets of Centro Mexico City. I’ve had exhibitions over the years. It’s a documentary project. I mean, I’m still, that’s what I learned, that’s how I photograph, that’s how I still photograph. I look at it as documenting a certain space in time here in Mexico City. I mean I still have an assignment here and an assignment there. I still pitch things, you know, to try to interest people in stories. A lot of times it has to do with Guerrero. A lot of times it has to do with violence. A lot of times it has to do with displaced people. But the response, once again being honest, the response to those kind of stories is just not what it used to be.

Voice Over

00:42:26

00:42:41

Just months after this conversation, a powerful earthquake rocked Mexico City, killing hundreds. And the response was overwhelming. For weeks following the quake, Keith was swamped with assignments documenting the tremor’s aftermath.

Voice Over

00:42:42

00:42:54

Neither Keith nor any member of his immediate family was injured during the earthquake. But his apartment building was badly damaged. He and his wife refused to return, believing the building to be unsafe.

Voice Over

00:42:56

00:43:20

Another of my colleagues was not so lucky. I knew Wesley Bocxe back in the 1980s when we both covered the conflicts raging across Central America. Like me, he once was a freelance photojournalist. Wesley was badly injured in the quake. His wife was killed.

Voice Over

00:43:34

00:43:49

This is a compromise that all foreign correspondents – not just freelancers -- live with every day. In their quest for truth, they face unforeseen circumstances of living in countries that pose risks that we seldom have to consider.

Voice Over

00:44:00

00:44:11

It’s my last day in Nogales with Ioan Grillo. We sit down to discuss what he’s learned here, before heading out one more time to the border separating Mexico from the United States.

Gentile

00:44:11

00:44:24

What are the most important takeaways from this really widely spread reporting trip that we’ve witnessed you execute over the past couple of days?

Grillo

00:44:25

00:46:07

Over the last few days of reporting I’ve learned something about the human smuggling, the drug smuggling networks into the United States. I’ve been reporting on this border for 15 years, and I’ve seen some changes now, from before. Before, you had some people would go over the border by themselves and some would go with human smugglers, known as coyotes or polleros. Now, from this reporting, people are saying that you cannot cross the border without paying a coyote. People say, now if you try and go near the wall or the desert any place right now and you haven’t paid, people are going to beat the hell out of you, or kill you for not paying for their services. They really now have tightened that up. And now all of these coyotes now, there used to be some coyotes who were like independent workers, gradually the cartels got more and more involved and now all of them are working for the cartels. Any migrant has to pay a coyote. Any coyote has to pay a cartel. And the money, the cost that the coyotes are charging has increased a lot. A few years ago I was up here reporting and it was two thousand dollars that people would pay a coyote to go to the United States. Now it’s four and a half thousand dollars.

Gentile

00:46:08

00:46:34

It seems to me that this a profound, dramatic change in how things operate on the border, not just in terms of how the cartels work in this region, but also in a sense that it represents to me a greater vacuum of power exerted by the state. Am I wrong about this or does that sound correct?

Grillo

00:46:35

00:47:53

This is part of a wider problem in Mexico, of the cartels taking over so many aspects of life in Mexico. They are not just drug traffickers. These are criminal organizations moving into a whole bunch of realms so here, the human smuggling industry, the migrant industry, is now controlled by cartels. Also they control political power in many local levels, so that you see cities and towns in Mexico, where the mayors have to pay 10 percent of their budget to the cartels. Not the other way around. You know it used to be that the cartels, the drug traffickers would bribe the mayors, now the mayors have to pay the cartels. You see areas of mining that have been taken over by cartels. The cartels are involved in the theft of petroleum. Of crude oil. We’re talking about billions of dollars here. So, they are now like these criminal war lords type figures, controlling these aspects.

Voice Over

00:47:54

00:48:07

As Ioan and Milton plan a trip back to the border, I consider the sum of what I’ve seen here. Violence. Failing health care. Powerful cartels. Corruption – all signs of a crippled, dysfunctional state.

Grillo

00:48:10

00:48:39

Where we’re going right now, we’re following a local police vehicle there. Milton contacted the local police that we’re interested going out there and could they come with us. It’s a security precaution because it’s a rough area. As Milton says it’s “Territorio Apache,” which is a phrase they use in Spanish to talk about tough areas.

Gentile

00:49:00

00:49:08

Such a beautiful place. And sadly, such a potentially violent place.

Voice Over

00:49:16

00:49:36

There’s the U.S. border fence atop a hillside. It looks like a giant spinal column of rusted steel separating the two countries. This is a flood zone during rainy season. The border is actually railroad tracks and barbed wire, as opposed to a solid wall or fence that would hinder the flow of water and debris across the landscape.

Grillo

00:49:37

00:50:22

So I was just talking to Comandante Mendoza, and he was describing how this area is normally patrolled by the military and the federal police, not the city police. This is normally the military federal police patrolling this area, looking after this area, because this is their jurisdiction because if they do run into stuff it can often be heavily armed guys. You can see these kind of things are pretty attractive to smugglers, these kinds of places. I mean that’s the United States right there, and there’s Mexico right here. I mean that looks pretty easy to jump, I mean we could very easily go into the United States.

Voice Over

00:50:23

00:50:36

Thousands of undocumented migrants cross this border each year. They flee poverty and drug gangs in their own  countries. Most bring only clothes on their back and hope in their heart for new life in the United States.

Gentile

00:50:37

00:51:01

We’ve been here a little over twenty-four hours. And in that time frame you have gone out at night, to look at the fence, to look around Nogales. You have interviewed the mayor of this city. We have come out here to the countryside. We’ve done a couple of other things, you know, running around and working pretty much twenty-four hours a day. Do you think that people understand what real journalists really do? What’s your perception of what they perceive?

Grillo

00:51:02

00:52:10

What I want them to understand from this particular, I’m thinking about the story itself, so, I mean like all of these stories are complicated, and I just want to say that it’s not so simple. I mean there is an issue with the United States border with undocumented workers, with cartels, with smugglers. These are real issues. But what I want to try to get across is the real human stories. So when you go to these shelters and you see people who are human beings,  who have had tough lives, or who live tough lives and you imagine what they go through. There are people just coming out of incarceration, being deported, and trying to send money back to their families, to feed their children, these are the human stories, that whatever you feel about these issues, and they’re real issues, they’re real issues with undocumented workers in the work force, with wages, with trade unions, with social services with hospitals, these are real issues for people. But if we could just feel the humanity of these stories. The humanity of these people. I try and do these things from my heart and do good work.

Voice Over

00:52:11

00:52:26

Regardless of how we feel about the legality or the humanity of it all, this long steel line separates more than just two nations. It separates husbands from wives. Children from parents. Brothers from sisters.

Voice Over

00:52:30

00:52:41

As Ioan Grillo and I walk along this frontier, I wonder: if it’s not these freelancers who help send us the truth about Mexico and the rest of the world -- then who?

ENDIT