Mexican wins Pulitzer for Wal-Mart corruption exposé
Von Bertrab, 45, made her name as a journalist in Guadalajara in the early 1990s. On Monday she and colleague David Barstow received 10,000 dollars in prize money for their in-depth series for the New York Times, the first part of which was published in April 2012.
The Wal-Mart investigation
“We started in May 2011 and we continued working on the story for a total of 19 months,” von Bertrab told the Reporter. Throughout this time, not even her closest friends knew what she was up to and even her father knew only the most basic of details.
Von Bertrab and Barstow’s investigation exposed how Wal-Mart employees had bribed Mexican officials as the chain began to expand south of the border in 2005. The pair unearthed evidence that Wal-Mart had made cash payments of up to 24 million dollars in order to obtain building permits and reductions in environmental impact fees.
Citing internal emails and Wal-Mart files, von Bertrab and Barstow also showed that top executives had sought to cover up evidence of these corrupt dealings. They never received any threats or external pressure while working on the story, von Bertrab said, largely due to the fact that they “worked very silently, mostly by going through public records.”
Their reporting prompted an investigation by the Justice Department into whether Wal-Mart had violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It also led to an investigation by House Democrats Elijah Cummings and Henry Waxman, who warned Wal-Mart in August that freshly uncovered internal documents suggested the company “may have had compliance issues relating not only to bribery, but also to ‘questionable financial behavior’ including tax evasion and money laundering in Mexico.”
In a follow-up article printed in December, von Bertrab and Barstow documented how Wal-Mart, “an aggressive and creative corrupter,” had paid more than 200,000 dollars in bribes to build a store on protected land next to the Teotihuacan pyramids, a major tourist attraction near Mexico City.
Learning the trade at Siglo 21
A tenacious reporter, von Bertrab learned her craft in Guadalajara, having moved here from Mexico City at the age of 14 and then studied communication at the private ITESO university.
She started out as a university radio host at the age of 18 and two or three years later began writing for the now-defunct local newspaper Siglo 21. As one of Siglo 21’s investigative reporters, von Bertrab worked on stories ranging from drug trafficking to state corruption and political assassinations.
Von Bertrab (she uses Alejandra Xanic as her byline) made her breakthrough in 1992, winning the National Journalism Award for her coverage of a series of underground gasoline explosions that tore up eight miles of streets in Guadalajara.
“She was living at home then and working at Siglo 21, which had just started. Only about four people started it and Xanic was one of them,” her father Guillermo von Bertrab told the Reporter.
None of the other local dailies fully investigated the build-up of gas prior to the blasts, meaning the fledgling Siglo 21 was the only paper in Guadalajara to warn that this would lead to an explosion.
“I remember driving her to the Pemex installations so she could jump a wall to get in and see what was going on. Later I drove her to the newspaper. She and some technicians had guessed the danger before the explosion,” recounted her father, who resides in Guadalajara. “The whole family was awake that night, especially Xanic, because she had to work on the story until 3 or 4 a.m., when the newspaper was printed. The story ran the headline ‘Va a explotar’ (It’s going to explode) and just after that, at 8 a.m. or so, it did.”
The blasts in the city’s sewer system left over 200 people dead, at least 500 injured and as many as 15,000 homeless. The event not only changed society, but it also sparked the rise of investigative journalism in Guadalajara, with Siglo 21 at the forefront.
“That story had a big impact on Siglo 21, which had only been running for four or five months at the time,” von Bertrab said. “We were seen as these young, naïve idealists, but we got so much publicity from the story and that gave us more weight.”
Investigative journalism in Mexico
Von Bertrab continued working for the paper as it evolved into Publico (which was later bought by Milenio) and in 1996 she graduated with a master’s in international journalism at USC Annenberg in Los Angeles. She later moved to Mexico City to work for CNN’s business magazine Expansion and cover health and social issues as a freelancer for the likes of National Geographic, Milenio and Reforma.
Now an experienced professional, von Bertrab has developed an expertise in using the Freedom of Information Act that Mexico only passed in 2002 and she has become an active trainer of fellow reporters.
“Watchdog journalism is very, very important in Mexico,” she told the Reporter. “We have to be demanding with ourselves in terms of facts and the depth of reporting. We must be much more active in documenting corruption, but also in reporting on initiatives to change the country in a constructive manner.”
Having learned from her experience with the New York Times, von Bertrab is aware that journalists in Mexico need greater time and resources to produce more thorough investigative work.
“In the Mexican media, reporters often have to hand in three of four stories a day, meaning they can’t investigate or corroborate information,” she said. “We need more opportunities to produce investigative journalism. It would be great to be able to advance our stories, but we need better salaries and more support in the newsrooms in order to do more in-depth work.”
Citing her New York Times colleague Barstow as an inspiration – “he is a great editor and he was a humongous help to me” – von Bertrab said Mexican reporters need more high-quality editors who will support them and demand fewer, but better stories.
Well-earned plaudits
For now, she can take pride in being one of three Mexicans awarded a Pulitzer Prize this year. Leading the plaudits in the local press this week was El Informador columnist Diego Peterson, a former colleague of von Bertrab in Siglo 21.
Peterson recalled how in 1995, when the privatization of Mexico’s railways was announced, von Bertrab asked for unpaid leave to travel the country by rail. Determined to capture what was the end of an era for Mexico’s rail industry, she traveled as a stowaway aboard a freight train from the frontier with Guatemala to the U.S. border.
Her dedication to a story was unbounded, Peterson noted. Her “most admirable work” came when researching an article on the deaf, he said. For six months, von Bertrab devoted all her free time to learning sign language, just so that she could communicate with her subjects without using intermediaries.
“I want to congratulate her. There are very few journalists like her in Mexico,” another Siglo 21 colleague, former photo editor Jose Hernandez Claire, told the Reporter. Hernandez praised von Bertrab as “a very professional and charismatic woman who was very committed to journalism from the outset.”
Her father was equally glowing in his assessment of her work as a reporter. “She took some risks. She was very brave,” he said. “She has done beautiful work and she’s being praised for it. I’m very happy for her.”
Elaine Halleck also contributed to this story.
Guadalajara authorities identify child prostitution hotspots
Child prostitution is most prevalent in the areas around Avenida Chapultepec, the San Juan de Dios market and the Calzada Independencia, Mayor Ramiro Hernandez said last week.
Addressing the Zero Tolerance for the Sexual Exploitation of Children forum, Hernandez vowed that his municipal government will act “energetically and rigorously” to eradicate this, “the most despicable of crimes.”
Hernandez told the forum that child prostitution not only occurs on the city streets, but also in diverse commercial establishments, adding that people trafficking is a 32-billion-dollar industry, the most lucrative illegal trade after drugs and arms trafficking.
In 2011, the Family Development Agency (DIF) tended 324 girls and 322 boys who had suffered sexual exploitation across Mexico, Ramiro said, noting that this unfortunately accounts for only a small proportion of the actual number of cases.
“It’s a growing problem and it is difficult to keep statistics, as many of these children are not registered or reported as missing by families,” added the forum coordinator, Maribel Alfeiran of the National Action Party (PAN). Alfeiran said that for every complaint received, another 20 or 30 cases go unreported – an assertion corroborated by the DIF estimate that over 20,000 minors were victims of child prostitution in Mexico in 2005.
Sexual abuse of children is rife in Mexico, with Tijuana, Acapulco, Cancun and Guadalajara considered the cities where it is most common. The impoverished southern state of Chiapas is also considered one of the worst areas in the world for child prostitution, with human rights groups reporting that children there are sold for as little as 100 to 200 dollars.
Crystal meth making inroads among youth
The School Addictions Survey 2012 showed that 30 (three percent) of every 1,000 secondary and high school (preparatoria) students in Guadalajara have taken methamphetamine, up from 26 three years ago. This is roughly in line with consumption in the United States, where several studies have shown that two to three percent of young people have tried methamphetamine by the time they leave high school.
In the Guadalajara metropolitan area, consumption has risen most, by 68 percent, in Tonala. It has also risen by 47 percent in Tlaquepaque and 11 percent in Guadalajara, but fell by 39 percent in Zapopan.
Of 13 Jalisco municipalities surveyed, the worst was Tepatitlan, where consumption has rocketed by 90 percent in the last three years. In this time, the survey showed, methamphetamine and marijuana are the only drugs of which consumption has risen.
Methamphetamine is a synthetic drug produced in laboratories, as documented in popular US TV series “Breaking Bad.” More commonly known as “crystal meth,” “ice,” or simply “meth,” it is a highly addictive pyschoactive stimulant that can be injected, smoked or snorted.
The rise in consumption coincides with increased availability, with Jalisco being home to one of every five meth labs discovered in Mexico in the last six years. The PGR says production is concentrated in three states, with 388 meth labs discovered in Michoacan, 225 in Sinaloa and 177 in Jalisco during the Felipe Calderon administration. Notably, these are all Pacific states in close proximity to the major ports of Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas, where the precursor chemicals necessary for meth production are smuggled into Mexico.
The Tequila Files 