by KEN HECHTMAN

How I happened to be in Mexico during the mid-September Cancun WTO summit was a speaking gig at the University of Monterrey. The university's Information Agency (a high-tech, intensive journalism department) puts on an annual one-day Extreme Journalism conference. They wanted my "Mirror Journalist Charged with Espionage and Held Prisoner by the Taliban for Four Days" story from November 2001 - which I actually don't want to make a career of retelling - and in exchange they offered to pay my way to Mexico for a week, with the possibility of a side-trip to do a story of my own on maquiladoras, the cross-border factory industry. Not a bad deal.

I was met at the airport by a couple of students: Alejandro, a keener in horn-rimmed nerd glasses, and Monica, a smart but silent type. They'd be my handlers, roadies, translators and everything else over the next five days.

Alejandro's 15 minutes of fame came last September when a hurricane-driven flash flood washed away a farmers' market in a dry riverbed in Monterrey, drowning over 100 people, and he went out in the hurricane to cover it. Over tequilas that night, he and Monica invited themselves along on my trip to Matamoros, a city of 350,000 on the Texas border that's at the heart of the maquiladora industry. My plan was to spend a couple of days there to research my story and get back to Monterrey in time for the conference.

I told them, "Well, now… I guess I can let you tag along and hold my coat. You might even learn something…" I told myself, "Hot shit! Translators!"

Introduction to Narconomics

With everything I'd heard about the decline of the maquiladoras, I didn't expect to see miles of shopping malls on the highway and boutiques in town, all stocked with consumer goods priced as much as triple what they cost at home and all built within the last three or four years. Everybody knows drug money is driving the boom - but nobody wants to talk about it.

There are some solid Econ 101 reasons why drug money is a particularly effective development engine. Drug dealers pay higher wages than legitimate businesses and they spend their profits where they live. That puts money into other people's hands, and they then spend it where they live - and so on. In economist jargon, that's called the multiplier effect. Carlos Lehder, formerly the brains of the Medellin Cartel and currently serving life-to-forever in a U.S. federal prison, had this all figured out 20 years ago. His dream was to use narco-dollars to develop Latin America the way petro-dollars developed the Gulf States.

A Colombian journalist I met at the conference, Pastor Vivriescas, knew something about this. He said, "Somewhere in my office I have a 20-year-old audio tape of an interview with Carlos Lehder where he talks about this stuff. I remember that interview. Lehder took one look at my clunky, beat-up old tape recorder and gave me a new one. I still have it."

The conference itself went better than expected. First up on the panel was Vivriescas. I think of him as the Spanish-speaking Robert Fisk. He talks to the communist rebels, the army, the death squads, the cocaine cartels and he's the only Colombian reporter who can do that without getting killed for it. He knows how to catch the interest of a college crowd, too. The video he brought showed an attack and capture of a small town by FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia], the largest of the peasant-based communist guerillas. The cameraman wasn't in the back-and-to-the-side position favoured by television news, but in the first wave of the assault. At one point, the cameraman dove for cover as a nearby grenade explosion kicked up dirt onto the camera lens. Vivriescas stopped the tape to deliver an aside. "This video was shot by students in my class," he said.

At the break, a gourmet Mexican meal was served to the guests and organizers, but Vivriescas brought his own snack, a fist-sized bag of dried black ants. Apparently this is a Colombian thing. It might also work as a war correspondent thing - eat a bag of ants for breakfast and you know nothing worse can possibly happen to you for the rest of the day.

Reporters, not freaks

When my turn came up, I mentioned that I don't much like the term "extreme journalism." It makes us sound like circus freaks. Not so long ago, everybody worked this way. Everybody believed you had to see the battle to report the battle, and everybody understood that amateur war reporting was the fast track to a career in the business.

I also brought the 2002 documentary Afghan Massacre, by Scottish journalist Jamie Doran. This is an exposé of the murder of over 3,000 Afghan prisoners of war by the forces of U.S.-backed Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum in northern Afghanistan in November 2001. It's been shown widely in Europe, where it generated enormous controversy, and was screened for the European Parliament. An abridged version - 20 of the original 50 minutes - played on the CBC last April, but it's never made it off the college and coffeehouse circuit in the U.S.

I showed it because some of the wartime incidents I'd written or heard rumours about had been captured on Doran's film. I was absolutely amazed at how well the video went over. Nobody in Mexico had ever seen anything like it. They get CNN and FOX News directly, and during the war the Mexican networks translated individual newsclips from the American networks. When the film showed the mass grave outside Mazar-i-Sharif, it had the audience's undivided attention.

We had a near-riot when the organizers tried to stop the video halfway through to break for lunch. A hastily arranged compromise left the conference hall open during the break and half the attendees watching the end of the video.

Closing off the panel was Gustavo Sierra, from Argentina's daily El Clarin, a journeyman war reporter with 27 years' experience. He also did a side trip up to the border for a story of his own about the large numbers of Argentinians driven by the financial crisis to come up to the border region to make the crossing into the U.S. He told stories of life in the Palestine Hotel, the journalists' compound in Baghdad during the ground war last March and April. The late-night council meetings, daily head counts and sharing of information and resources were a contrast to the usual cutthroat competitiveness of foreign corespondents. Sierra was there the day American tanks shelled the hotel and killed two cameramen, one of whom he describes as a close friend.

Traditional send-off

One of the drawbacks of war reporting is that the best stories are often the ones that can never be published. The only consolation is that reporters can sit in the bar and tell them to each other. The conference organizers thoughtfully booked an evening for just that.

I asked Vivriescas about the mythical FARC database. They're rumoured to have a database of everyone in Colombia who's anybody in the army, government or business. The guerillas will stop cars at a roadblock, collect IDs and run them through a laptop computer on the spot. A soldier or government official will be shot on the side of the road, a businessman will be held for ransom.

According to Vivriescas, it's all true and then some. He says the FARC guerillas have become experts in the science of profiling rich Colombians. In the same way that pool sharks can guess how much money a newcomer is carrying into the pool hall (by looking at his shoes, not his clothes), FARC will look at the house a businessman owns, the car he drives, the restaurants he eats in and guess how much ready money his family can raise to ransom him back. They know the rich better than the rich know themselves.