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A Reporter's Journey Through a Country's Descent into Darkness
Penguin
June 2013
On Sale: May 30, 2013
304 pages
ISBN: 159420439X
EAN: 9781594204395
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
n the last six years, more than eighty thousand people have
been killed in the Mexican drug war, and drug trafficking
there is a multibillion-dollar business. In a country where
the powerful are rarely scrutinized, noted Mexican American
journalist Alfredo Corchado refuses to shrink from reporting
on government corruption, murders in Juarez, or the ruthless
drug cartels of Mexico. A paramilitary group spun off from
the Gulf cartel, the Zetas, controls key drug routes in the
north of the country. In 2007, Corchado received a tip that
he could be their next target—and he had twenty four hours
to find out if the threat was true. Rather than leave his country, Corchado went out into the
Mexican countryside to trace investigate the threat. As he
frantically contacted his sources, Corchado suspected the
threat was his punishment for returning to Mexico against
his mother’s wishes. His parents had fled north after the
death of their young daughter, and raised their children in
California where they labored as migrant workers. Corchado
returned to Mexico as a journalist in 1994, convinced that
Mexico would one day foster political accountability and
leave behind the pervasive corruption that has plagued its
people for decades. But in this land of extremes, the gap of inequality—and
injustice—remains wide. Even after the 2000 election that
put Mexico’s opposition party in power for the first time,
the opportunities of democracy did not materialize. The
powerful PRI had worked with the cartels, taking a piece of
their profit in exchange for a more peaceful, and more
controlled, drug trade. But the party’s long-awaited defeat
created a vacuum of power in Mexico City, and in the
cartel-controlled states that border the United States. The
cartels went to war with one another in the mid-2000s,
during the war to regain control of the country instituted
by President Felipe Calderón, and only the violence
flourished. The work Corchado lives for could have killed
him, but he wasn't ready to leave Mexico—not then, maybe
never. Midnight in Mexico is the story of one man’s quest to
report the truth of his country—as he raced to save his own
life.
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