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From Baqueachi, Ana went to Madera, a town riven by conflicts between the Sinaloa and the Juárez cartels, and then to a community that had lost much of its water supply to cartels and wealthy families with political connections. As Ana absorbed the intricacies of Breach’s reporting, she grew impatient with an idea that some politicians and even journalists had espoused: that Breach hadn’t fully grasped the impact her reporting would have and had got in over her head. “She was a journalist who understood perfectly well what the risks were,” Ana told me. “As journalists, we’re in all the wrong places, with all the wrong people, because that is our job.” For decades, Breach had been on the road connecting dots, exposing wrongdoing, and challenging powerful interests. Any number of the stories she had pursued could have doomed her.
Cartel hit men have a tradition of editorializing their work, often by leaving messages on their victims, and right after Breach was killed a cardboard sign turned up at the crime scene. It blamed Breach’s death not on the Salazars but on one of the cartel’s enemies: Carlos Arturo Quintana, known as El 80, whom the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has called a leader of the Juárez cartel. (That Quintana had a grievance against Breach was entirely plausible: in 2016, she had revealed Quintana’s attempt to appoint mayoral candidates, including his mother-in-law.) Another sign materialized beside the body of a retired martial-arts instructor who had been shot in the head. It claimed that he was the person who killed Breach.
Under federal law in Mexico, families of victims are theoretically allowed to review investigative files in criminal cases, in order to see for themselves what police and prosecutors are doing to bring about justice. But, as leads multiplied and crisscrossed in the Breach case, her siblings found themselves thwarted by the state when they tried to gain access to the file. Losing faith in Corral, they petitioned for federal intervention in the case, securing it in April, 2018, with the help of Sara Mendiola Landeros, the director of Propuesta Cívica, a legal organization that defends human-rights activists and journalists. The siblings also finally received a copy of the state’s investigative file and shared its contents with the collective, according to Karina and Gibler. (The siblings declined through Mendiola to comment for this article, citing their need for “emotional tranquillity and security.” Breach’s daughter also declined to comment.)
“I may be emotionally unavailable, but the rest of me can be found right here, twenty-four seven.”
Cartoon by John Cuneo
Examining the thick file, collective members were shocked at what wasn’t in it: any indication that a state investigator had travelled to Chínipas, the place from which direct and indirect threats had been coming steadily in Breach’s final months. (Corral told The New Yorker that the state investigation was not yet finished when the federal government intervened.) Nor, it appeared to the collective, had tough questions been posed to the PRI and PAN officials who had warned Breach and Mayorga to stop reporting.
“There’s this myth that reporting on the cartels gets you killed,” Gibler told me. “And yes, it can, if you publish specific information about who is doing what and where. But, if you look at the majority of the more than one hundred journalists killed in the last decade in Mexico, most of them were working on stories about the collaboration between the political state apparatus and organized crime.” Breach had done that work “very explicitly,” he added. “First and last names, and names of criminal groups and political officials.”
Collective members had long suspected Hugo Schultz, the former Chínipas mayor who had warned Breach never to return to her home town, of having a role in her killing. So, when Gibler and three other members of the collective chanced upon Schultz at a congressional hearing on education in the state capital, they decided that they owed it to Breach to confront and question him themselves—even if it meant they’d be recognized and their identities revealed to the cartel.
When the hearing concluded, Schultz, in dark glasses, entered an elevator with his smiling wife and two bodyguards, and the collective members crowded in, too. A video taken by one of them shows the face of Schultz’s wife fall as another member asks the politician, “You gave [the Salazars] the recording—why did you give them the recording? We just want your side of the story.” Schultz hesitated, then replied, with controlled civility, “I have nothing to say, Miss.” Before stepping out, he added, “I am not hiding, I am working— I am coöperating with the government.”
Later, the elevator ride would seem to encapsulate the quixotic wishfulness at the heart of the collective’s project: journalists, already vulnerable, had made themselves more vulnerable still, with little to show for it. The reporters chased after the politician’s entourage for a few minutes, “but then,” Gibler told me, “we had to let them go.”
In some newspapers, elements of the state’s version of the plot to murder Breach—that the killing had been orchestrated by El Larry, the sicario chief—seemed to lock into place with uncanny precision. One of those elements involved a pilot named Jorge David Coughanour Buckenhofer, who owned a regional air-taxi service that connected Chihuahua City to other parts of the state.
After El Larry was captured, El Heraldo de Chihuahua published several stories alleging, without apparent evidence, that Coughanour also worked for the Salazar cartel and had whisked the supposed mastermind to Chínipas on his plane after the murder. The flight to the mountains had ended tragically, the newspaper said: as Coughanour landed, he accidentally hit and killed two girls who had been hanging out on the runway, and he then fled the scene in his plane.
Collective members secured a state forensic report, with photos, indicating that two girls had indeed died that night—but with small wounds on their heads that were inconsistent with being hit by a plane. The collective’s suspicions were further aroused by the fact that Coughanour was unavailable for questioning, either about those deaths or about the getaway flight after Breach’s murder. One evening a few weeks after she was killed, a car had pulled alongside Coughanour’s Mercedes, where he was seated with a friend in front of an Italian restaurant in Chihuahua City. Within moments, the pilot was shot at least six times through the driver’s-side window.
Months later, Gibler visited Coughanour’s family and discovered that they were anguished not just because of his murder, or because he’d been called a narcopilot in the paper, but because the notion that he had run over bystanders while landing impugned his skills. A volunteer air-ambulance pilot, Coughanour had a reputation for safety so impeccable that he’d been chosen to fly the state’s most important political figures, among them Javier Corral when he was running for governor.
Coughanour’s father shared with the collective the investigative file he’d received from the police. Law enforcement didn’t get a warrant for footage from a security camera outside the restaurant, and the responding homicide detective—who was also a detective in the Breach investigation—questioned only two witnesses at the scene. Gibler came to believe that state officials had no desire to determine who had killed Coughanor, and to what end. Their real goal, he thought, was to give the public a hard-to-refute story of how El Larry had commissioned a pilot to help him elude the police, in order to stop more penetrating questions from being asked.
Gibler told me that Coughanour’s father said to him one day, “Even you are here because of that journalist’s murder, not because of my son.” Gibler had replied, ruefully, “I’m sorry, but yes, you’re right.”
In 2010, an agency of the Mexican government was created to do what the March 23rd Collective would later try to do on its own: conduct a rigorous investigation of the facts when a journalist is murdered. The Special Prosecutor’s Office for Attention to Crimes Committed Against Freedom of Expression, known as FEADLE, was given the power to assume control of a state-level case if there appeared to be a connection between a journalist’s reporting and her death. By 2019, a FEADLE prosecutor was in control of the Breach case. El Larry’s trial was to resume later in the year, and Corral’s prosecutors had handed over state files.
FEADLE’s track record was something short of inspiring: since its founding, according to reports from the attorney general’s office, only one of FEADLE’s murder investigations had resulted in a conviction. But, after complaints from journalists and activists, an ambitious new prosecutor, Ricardo Sánchez Pérez del Pozo, had been hired. He had a graduate degree in human rights from Northwestern University, in Illinois, and had cut his teeth on the United Nations tribunal on war crimes in the Balkans.
At this point, collective members were exhausted. They needed to take a break and refocus on their paying jobs and families, instead of continuing a parallel investigation with many risks and no legal authority. The U.N., Reporters Without Borders, C.P.J., and other organizations were also doing what they could to keep the public from forgetting the case, and surely with that outside pressure FEADLE would now ask probing questions in Salazar territory.
However, when collective members met with Sánchez Pérez del Pozo, they were dismayed that he wouldn’t confirm that his investigators would be braving the mountains to ask questions. (The prosecutor told me that it would imperil his investigators to say anything about where they went.) As the federal investigation of the murder of a reporter who exposed links between politicians and drug traffickers appeared to tiptoe around both groups, demoralized collective members decided there was only one thing left to do: rest, recover, and then write the hell out of everything they had learned about the plot to kill Miroslava Breach.
When a celebrated Colombian journalist, María Teresa Ronderos, heard about the emotional and investigative difficulties that collective members had faced, she was determined to help. Ronderos understood the personal toll of this kind of reporting better than most: she had worked through the nineteen-eighties and nineties in Colombia, when reporting in many regions was perilous, and later she contributed to an investigation by Colombian journalists of the 2002 murder of the political columnist and editor Orlando Sierra Hernández—a project whose example had inspired some in the March 23rd Collective. Ronderos had since co-founded the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, in Costa Rica, and offered her Mexican counterparts its assistance, she said, “so that they did not feel so alone.”
Before long, Ronderos had also secured the support of two other organizations. Bellingcat—an independent investigative group based in the Netherlands, which is famous for its stories about Russian wrongdoing under Vladimir Putin—would help the collective do a last push for open-source intelligence research. Forbidden Stories—a nonprofit formed after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, in Paris, to continue the work of journalists who have been assassinated, jailed, or threatened—would help promote and distribute the collective’s findings in English and French as well as Spanish.
Breach’s grave, in Chihuahua City.Photograph by Natalie Keyssar for the New Yorker
In September, 2019, nearly two years after a journalist made an illicit courtroom recording of the state’s evidence, the March 23rd Collective published three investigative stories. The first piece documented how state and federal prosecutors ignored leads about Salazar operatives and PAN officials, including Schultz. The second examined suspicious murders and police failures linked to the Breach investigation, including the filed-away killing of Jorge David Coughanour. The final installment probed Breach’s work and the death threats against her. More than seventy publications in Mexico and around the world published the stories. Ronderos said, “One of the first questions everyone wanted to know is: who’s behind this anonymous collective?”—the question contributors were, of course, most reluctant to answer.
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