By James Breiner
For a class on narrative techniques
here in Mexico, I was looking for examples of the kind of writing you find in
New Yorker. The magazine Gatopardo has that reputation.
It was there I found the story of
"A hapless narco" ("Un narco sin suerte") by Alejandro Almazan
and immediately got hooked. It tells the story of one J.R., a singer of corridos, traditional songs that tell stories of
heroes and villains based on real people and events.
J.R. and his family are living a quiet
life up in the mountains when he hears about the fortunes being made in the
illegal drug trade by people in Culiacan, in northwestern Mexico. He decides he
wants a piece of that. But his every attempt fails for reasons that are by
turns hilarious and frightening.
The story is perfect in every detail.
So perfect, in fact, that I wondered if this were really journalism or fiction.
The magazine gave it a journalistic label: "reportaje," which is
definitely not fiction.
The deception of perfection
As a reporter and editor, I learned to
be suspicious of stories that are perfect in every detail: when the people fit
a perfect stereotype, when the stories unfold in a perfect dramatic sequence,
when the characters always utter the perfect phrase.
People love to repeat these kinds of
stories, and I had spent many hours as a reporter trying to verify them. You
could never find any of the people named because they existed only in that
perfect world. These stories are called urban legends.
So I asked some of my Mexican friends,
do you know this journalist Almazan?
Does he have a good reputation? Is he
credible? For the first time I heard the term "infrarrealistic
journalism" and I read the movement's manifesto by Diego Enrique
Osorno. It shares many traits with the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe. I also learned in an
article by Jorge Tirzo of the debate about whether there is a new wave of journalism storytelling
in Latin America.
The impolite question
I decided I had to interview Almazan
himself and ask him the tactless question directly: Did you make up any of it?
I found his Twitter account, sent him a
message and found out that we would both be attending an appropriate event, a
presentation on journalism ethics sponsored by the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation
for the New Iberoamerican Journalism. Almazan was on a panel. He had won the foundation's prize
the year before for feature writing.
After the event I went up to him and
asked him the impolite question. Was J.R., the wannabe drug dealer, a real
person or is he a composite of several people? Did the events happen exactly as
you portrayed them in your story? Or did you add a little spice to it? Almazan
was gracious and said he was accustomed to these kinds of questions.
"You have to ask"
For him, the truth lies in the details,
and the reporter's job is to gather those details.
"My journalism is no different
from that of anybody else," he said. "I go out into the streets and I
ask questions. I ask and I ask. The perfection comes from asking and asking and
asking.
"We all have a story to tell. If I
ask you about your glasses, surely there is a story there. If I ask you about
your jacket, it has a story. Your ring has a story. I'm a relentless questioner
and I am going to keep asking you questions.
"You have to show the reader that
you know everything. When you include these small details, you make your story
credible.
"The story is an interpretation of
reality. You and I have a different interpretation. We could tell the story of
what's happening in this room, and your story and mine would be
different."
A journalist's conscience
"My primary duty is to myself, and
that is to tell the truth. My truth. The interpretation of what I saw. The
other duty is to the people I talked with. I can't betray or distort their
story because in the end they are going to read it. What I try to do is be
sufficiently honest."
Almazan has been criticized for using
anonymous sources or changing people's names. He does it to protect their lives,
he said. Some of his sources have been killed because they were quoted in his
stories.
"That has happened to me. Those
deaths will stay with me my whole life. I don't want more of them pursuing
me."
When his editors or his critics ask him
about an anonymous source, he invites them to call the person up to verify the
facts or to come with him and see the places he described in his stories with
their own eyes.
Ties to El Chapo
In the case of J.R., who had ties with
the drug kingpin Chapo Guzman, the hapless singer asked Almazan not to use his
real name. He feared he would be killed by a rival drug gang. Almazan told me
the real name of J.R. and told me to look up his songs on YouTube. I can tell
you that they do exist.
Then I asked Almazan if he thought it
would cause the real J.R. any problem if I used his real name in a story. He
said probably not because the singer had moved to another city and the events
had occurred four years ago. But he had not asked the singer's permission to
use his real name. I decided not to use it here.
Almazan has published several books of
journalism, among them, The Kalashnikov Babes and Other Stories (Chicas Kaláshnikov y otras crónicas)
and a novel based on the life of Chapo Guzman, Public Enemy No. 1 (El más buscado).
The challenge of writing fiction
A publisher approached him with the idea
of writing a biography of Chapo but Almazan declined.
"The life of Chapo is surrounded
by urban legends," he explained. It's impossible today to sort out what is
true and what has been invented. "Journalistically I could not write a
biography of Chapo. If I said this is the life of Chapo Guzman, I would be
lying. So I decided to write a novel based on these urban legends."
It takes him much more time and effort
to write fiction. "For me, reality is better than fiction. I don't have
the ability to invent so many stupid things."
The marvelous
Daily reality has enough amazing
things, he said, that journalists don't need to go "searching for
Macondo," the imaginary town of the novelist Garcia Marquez. "The
fantastic is out there in the streets. From literature we need to steal
everything but the fiction."
By the end of the interview, Almazan
had convinced this skeptic.
It seems appropriate to mention that
two giants of journalism in Latin America, the same Garcia Marquez and Ryszard
Kapuściński, have also been the target of critics who question the truthfulness
of their work. The suggestion is that they manipulated facts to create
more-perfect stories.
A response lies in the comments of
Garcia Marquez to a journalism class at El Pais newspaper in Spain in 1995. They were recorded by Jan
MartÃnez Ahrens and are translated here:
"A story requires a narrator who
is grounded in reality. And this is where ethics comes in. In the profession of
journalism there are two requirements: the journalist has to make the story
credible and he has to know in his conscience that what he writes is the truth.
Whoever gives in to the temptation and lies, even if it is about the color of
someone's eyes, betrays the profession."
This post originally appeared on the
blog News Entrepreneurs. It is
published on IJNet with the author's permission.
James Breiner is a consultant in online
journalism and leadership. He is a former co-director of the Global Business Journalism Program at
Tsinghua University and a former ICFJ Knight International Journalism
Fellow who launched and directed the Center for Digital Journalism at the University of
Guadalajara. He is bilingual in Spanish and English. You can follow
him on Twitter here.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via MTSOfan.
Source: IJNEt.org
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