Reportero

Reportero examines the violent world threatening Mexican journalists by focusing on the violent 32-year history of Zeta Weekly, an independent weekly newspaper in Tijuana, and the investigative reporters that risked their lives to provide the news.

Back in the early 1980s, Mexico was an authoritarian state where the government owned the press. If you wanted to write an article that the government didn’t like, it didn’t get published. If you wanted to print your own news, you couldn’t because the government owned the only paper company. Tired of being censored out of reporting what he truly saw, Juan Jesus Blancornelas started Zeta Weekly just over the border in California where he had freedom of the press, and shipped the newspaper back over to Mexico to a population ravenous for real news. During its first decade, Zeta’s main source of juicy content involved corrupt politicians; but then the ‘90s hit with its ensuing war on drugs, which gave rise to major drug cartels, who to this day assassinate journalists who publish stories that paint them in a negative light.

And that’s where Reportero essentially ends, rendering it interesting but disappointing. Rather than focusing on the unprecedented rash of violence occurring right now, director Bernardo Ruiz elects to follow veteran Zeta Weekly reporter Sergio Haro through some rather mundane current stories (taking photos of workers at a landfill, teen boys in a rundown building) as an excuse to tell the seminal newspaper’s violent history. Surely this is important information to help understand how the current state of affairs came to be, but Ruiz’s flaw is that he stops short of showing how life-threatening it is to be a modern-day journalist, waiting until the final title card to show the disturbing stat that over 40 journalists have been killed since 2006. We don’t even meet any young journalists until the very end, as well — both of whom seem overly naïve and optimistic, perhaps even dangerously ignorant of the risks they’re accepting simply for being a member of the press.

Perhaps this wouldn’t be necessary if Ruiz had capitalized on following Haro investigating a story rather than just following him around. We see Haro talk about times when his life was threatened, and when he struggled to decide whether or not they were going to print a story that they thought would put them in danger. But having these events merely talked about as stories from the past when we know that Haro and the other reporters interviewed ended up fine, Reportero distances the viewer from the emotional impact that would be felt if these risky stories were being investigated right before our eyes.

Reportero is barely 70 minutes long, yet still drags as it fumbles toward its conclusion where it finally asks an interesting question: why would any sane person who values their life want to be a reporter? Haro offers his own reasons. But he’s in a unique position, having survived in this business for over twenty years already. Given how the violence has escalated drastically over the past decade, Reportero misses the opportunity to explore the thought-processes of those journalists jumping into the field now. And sadly that’s what relegates Ruiz’s film more toward being an extended 60 Minutes episode rather than a scintillating exposé in the same vein of the journalists’ he honors.