On May 15, when he was killed, Javier Valdez left the Rio Doce wording at 11:56 hours. Oscar told the web administrator “God bless me”, as he used to say when saying goodbye; “...and that I get you confessed,” Oscar replied, smiling, creating the usual joke. The last time you saw the fat journalist was three Astekai workers. A few minutes before, among jokes, they were taking pictures with the famous Valdés hat. It wouldn't have been five minutes since he left, when a neighbor of the building entered the office yelling, "You've shot one of your peers! ".

Apparently, a white car was introduced into his red toyota and closed him a step about a hundred meters below the car he was driving. Two men forced him to swell on his knees and shot him 12 shots in the street, one of them in the head. Thus, the chronicles written in the weekly Río Doce and in the daily La Jornada, but also in the books, mustered: Miss Narco, Narco Orphans, Malayerba, Narco Journalism. The press in the midst of crime and denunciation…

In 2011 he was awarded the International Press Freedom Award, in his speech he said: “In the Culiacan de Sinaloa it is dangerous to be alive and to do journalism is an invisible line walking, performed by the evil people who are in drug trafficking and in the government. You have to be attentive to everything and everything.”

Since 2000, more than 125 journalists have died in the official accounts of crimes attributed to drug traffickers in Mexico. Not much, among the 170,000 people who have lost their lives in Mexico since Felipe Calderón declared the war on drug trafficking in 2007. Too much, so that no one dares to guarantee information with minimal freedom about what is happening in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The missing, the other media, professionals and volunteers working on community radio stations from far away from the capital are out of the official lists of journalists killed in Mexico.

From the Mexican capital, the weekly Processo, which deals with these issues, has lost two journalists, one of them with his friend, and seven of the 15 journalists he has today are threatened with death. Among them, veteran journalist José Gil Olmos, who wrote about the violations committed by soldiers in Chiapas in 1994. In the French magazine Memoire des luttes of February, the Mexican journalist reported the dramatic situation in which they find themselves and which sometimes seems surreal.

“We are converted into war correspondents,” Gil Olmos said, but from an unconventional war. In a classic conflict, there's a brow that's more or less drawn. In Mexico, nobody knows who it is. The police, both municipal, state or federal, and the military are confronted in the fight with armed groups of organized crime, self-defense groups – sometimes manipulated by the cartels or the authorities by the popular militia – and indigenous community policemen. It also happens that the forces of authority start fighting each other.”

As shown in the wars, journalists in Mexico hide their existence. The journalists of Processo comply with a strict protocol when they go to dangerous places: never go alone, do not wear a tape recorder, in the hotels are sellers, in the controls are presented baserritarras, do not rent the car for tuition in the capital, do not drink alcohol, be careful with the nice women who come to you, communicate with the writing through the encrypted Telegram... But journalists working in the media in conflict areas far from the capital do not have such costumes at their disposal.

Desperately, go ahead.

Born in 1967 in the Culiacán de Sinaloa, trained in sociology, Javier Valdés had been doing journalism for almost 30 years 500 kilometers from the capital. In recent times, the Mexican authorities had made special follow-up to the confrontation that arose after the extradition of Joaquín Chapo Guzmán to the United States in the Sinaloa cartel, where the hierarchy of the narcos is at stake.

In a chronicle of La Jornada on May 3 he reported a warm conversation between the sons of Chapo and Damaso López El Licenciado, who ended shooting. The details offered to the reader showed the knowledge that Valdés had of what was happening in the Sinaloa. The latest news had been posted a couple of days before death. “A command kills a councilman of Navolato (Sinaloa).”

Valdez told the pressures that journalists like him face everywhere. If a group of narcos loses strength, if the leader is arrested, the journalist is called to not publish the news; in an hour later another group will call him asking the director to publish the news and then the third, ordering him to post it on the first page and in great words. In the end, as soon as the newspaper comes out, a group of sicarians can make all the copies disappear by buying them one by one in each kiosk. At the same time, from within the writing, an ‘ear’ (delator) has made known to the mafia who has made such news and what topics they are dealing with in the magazine for the next issues.

Valdez had long been desperate for the failure of journalism. Stop researching and discussing Narkoa, that now the media are limited to telling the dead, that they don't tell stories of people, murderers, victims. Fear and self-censorship have overwhelmed Mexico. I believed in the chronicles, even though the best writing will not pick up all that hell.

Valdez wasn't optimistic about the future. Asked about the future when he was awarded the international prize in 2011, he said: “This will become even more complicated. Narko's violence will thrive, as the federal government will continue to treat this as a war, when it's basically business: more weapons, more soldiers, police, teams and patrols will bring more death, more violence and more everyday fear, a life. Although it is appealing, the damage done so far to our 30 million children is irreparable, as young and old people will remember their childhood as a war. In the DNA, in the genes, they will carry the gunpowder into the skin, the splash of blood, the incontinence of the beetle. I ask myself which people are going to come up with that background, which parents, officials, political drivers, entrepreneurs, teachers. That is the other death, that of our future, the saddest result, the worst.”