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“I quit and take a job in radio before something bad can happen.”

Later, when things calm down, he returns to Diario a wiser man.

Here is what a wise man knows: that certain people—drug leaders, the corrupt police, the corrupt military—these things cannot be written about at all. That other people should be mentioned favorably unless they are caught in circumstances so extreme that the news cannot be suppressed. Then, they appear in the paper, but the blow is softened as much as possible. Nor are investigations favored. If someone is murdered, you call the proper authorities and you print exactly what they tell you. But you don’t poke around in such matters.

Emilio loves politics and develops page-one stories by dutifully interviewing politicians and then nakedly publishing their inane answers. Sometimes, when a leading drug figure is arrested, usually as a show to placate the U.S. agencies, he interviews this person, also. He is hard-driving, at least until his son is born. After that, he becomes cautious because he must think of his son and not give in to the dangers of ambition.

For a while, he works for a small radio station and he makes one report on how a mayor in a neighboring town has fired the local drug counselor for the schools. He wonders on the air if the officials themselves are actually clean.

He soon finds out because a mayor of another town is listening. This mayor has just gotten out of a treatment center in El Paso for cocaine addiction. He storms down to the radio station and offers the owner ten thousand pesos to fire Emilio. The owner obliges him.

He moves from paper to paper and eventually winds up at the paper in Ascensión, the region of Chihuahua where he was raised. He has mastered, he thinks, the rules of the game. He writes down answers and publishes them. He avoids drug dealers. He is careful about offending politicians. He does not look into the lives of the rich, nor does he explore how they make their money. He is clean, he avoids taking bribes. But he also ignores the fact that other reporters are taking bribes. He is not looking for trouble.

This is the reality of Mexican reporting, where a person is inside but outside, where a person knows more than the public but can only say what is known in a code and this code had better not be too clear. A world where submission is essential and independence is eventually fatal.

He is stressed because, even though he plays by the rules, he cannot know all the rules and he cannot be certain when the rules change. He can understand certain things. When a general comes to Chihuahua in April 2008 with an army and says if there are any rapes and robberies, they are to be assigned to Mexican migrants, well, that is the way it will be reported.

He will obey his instructions for a very simple reason.

For three years, he has been afraid he will be murdered by the Mexican army. He has, to his horror, committed an error. And nothing he has done in the past three years has made up for this mistake. He has ceased reporting on the army completely. He has focused on safe things such as fighting the creation of a toxic waste facility in the town. He has apologized to various military officers and endured their tongue lashings. Still, this cloud hangs over him.

He can remember the day he blundered into this dangerous country.

Miss Sinaloa

After two months or more, Miss Sinaloa seems to recover some of her mind. El Pastor estimates that she eventually regained 90 percent of her sanity. He locates her relatives, and her family comes up from Sinaloa. They must be surprised that she is alive. I am. After such a frolic, death would not be unusual, and Miss Sinaloa would be just one more mysterious dead woman in the desert on the outskirts of Juárez.

But something saved her—perhaps her madness set her apart.

And so she came here and lived with people considered beneath even the dirt flooring the city of Juárez, people from the streets, people rejected by the mental institutions of the state, people