Free To Die in Mexico: Dispatches From Inside the Drug War by John Gibler Page A

is able to intercept their communications. He has studied their codes. This is how he learns when and where the bodies fall. He used to tap into the police radio system, but the cops recently shifted to a prohibitively expensive Israeli radio company, and so now he taps into the ambulance radios.
    As we are talking in the bunker, he picks up a call and holds the radio close to his ear. He hears, “five bravo fourteen,” grabs his mobile phone and makes several calls to confirm. Five stands for wounded, bravo for bullet wound, and fourteen for dead. So “five bravo fourteen,” translates to “the bullet wound victim died.” That is his cue. Pepis looks up and says that someone has been executed on the outskirts of town. “It appears as if it is the guy they grabbed in front of the reporters an hour or two ago,” he says.
    We pile into the white Chevy pickup with the Primera Hora logo painted on the sides and head out. It takes us about fifteen minutes to get to the scene.
    The pride of the blood photographer used to be arriving on the scene before the cops, paramedics, and most important, other reporters. The photographer could thus work in peace. He or she could walk right up to the body without navigating police lines and have a few minutes to try to get the right angle and capture the light without the image being filled with the clutter of detectives, ambulances, and other photographers. The photographer could fill the frame with death and nothing else, and hope for the front page and good sales. Not anymore. In too many occasions killers return to the scene of an execution to either make sure the victim is in fact dead, or to kill someone else they missed the first time. In such situations the killers will execute anyone in the way of their task. So now reporters, paramedics, and even the police themselves will often wait awhile before getting too close to a dead body on the street.
    “Trying to get the exclusive shot is a thing of the past here for us,” Pepis says. “We’ve had to put a stop to that, to self-censor. Now when there is an event, we’ll go, but we try not to get there before the authorities.”
    The Culiacán government says that they have an average response time to homicide calls of four to eight minutes. Pepis says it is more like half an hour, and it can sometimes take them up to five hours. He gives an example, “I went to cover a homicide in Navolato once. . . . From the moment I heard the report, I coordinated with my colleagues and lost ten minutes. In the time it took me to drive to Navolato, another twenty-five minutes, so it’s now been thirty-five minutes. I arrive at the scene and see a person’s body discarded there, but there is nobody around. No one is there except the curious locals looking at the body. I asked one guy, ‘Hey, the cops?’ ‘They haven’t come yet,’ he says. I was waiting around for another thirty minutes when we see several trucks with mounted headlights like the drug gunmen use, coming at us from the distance. And the trucks are going full speed, jumping over all the street bumps. The people scream, ‘Here come the killers!’ They dive for cover in the bush and run where they can. And the body is alone again, like a dead animal in the woods. I stayed nearby. The trucks belonged to the state police, arriving as fast as they could, putting on their circus, but over an hour had passed since the report went out.”
    We arrive at the scene and park the truck. The body has been discarded on the side of a dirt road a few feet from a barbed wire fence. Everything is green; it is the rainy season. We are at the northern edge of the city, about a hundred yards from the back wall of the last subdivision. Looking across a weed-covered field we can see clearly the second-story windows of at least ten houses. The people who live there must have heard the shots. No one would think of knocking on doors to ask them if they had: not the reporters, not the police. No