A Drug Reporter's Strange Brew
Al Giordano's Narco News mixes rants and theories with the occasional scoop
Five years ago, Al Giordano, a former protégé of Abbie Hoffman and a political reporter for The Boston Phoenix, disappeared into Latin America on a one-way ticket. He resurfaced months later with a dispatch in the Phoenix from "somewhere in the mountains of southeast Mexico," a phrase that echoes the signoff of the Zapatista rebel leader, Subcomandante Marcos, and he's been in Latin America ever since. He keeps his exact location secret, but his location on the World Wide Web — narconews.com — is not. From there he trumpets a strange mix of news and opinion, rant and fact, about the worlds of drugs, drug policy, and drug enforcement.
Giordano, who's always been an activist first and a journalist second — he'd been arrested twenty-seven times by the time he was thirty — says he had intended to abandon journalism and enlist with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. But the rebels, he says, insisted that it was with pen and paper that he could best serve their struggle. "I'd go in and talk to the Zapatistas, and I'd say I'm not a journalist, I don't want to be a journalist, I don't like journalists," he says. "And they'd say, 'Yes you are, you are a journalist. Journalism is what you should do.' "
So Giordano began writing again, mostly about the intersection of drugs and political corruption, and for the last few years has been stirring up trouble from his new home. He agreed to lead me there recently, but only after I consented to keep its location secret. The secrecy is crucial, he says, because he has taken issue with some powerful and violent people in Latin America. Traffickers, he contends, are the least of his worries. "I've gotten threatening messages from Colombian paramilitaries," he says. "I'm not a paranoid person, but why take a chance?"
Giordano lives in a quiet place where in the summer the evening rain clings to the grass. His spartan home is wired to the world through a phone line, an Internet connection, and a satellite dish that beams in music videos, sitcoms, and Larry King Live. When he's not traveling, he spends most of his time parked in front of a laptop computer chain-smoking filterless cigarettes while answering e-mail, translating articles from the Spanish-language press, or composing endless diatribes denouncing what he considers the moral bankruptcy of the American drug war.
Occasionally, Giordano files reports for the Phoenix or The Nation, but most of his writing is confined to the pages of the Web site he launched in the spring of 2000 after leaving Chiapas. He publishes a new "issue" of The Narco News Bulletin every few weeks, updating the site whenever something worth posting (or linking to) crosses his path. Issue #23, up in early fall, includes stories celebrating protests in Mexico that brought a new airport project to its knees, linking the Bush administration to Colombia's paramilitaries, and attacking the work of the New York Times South America correspondent Juan Forero, who is described on the site as a U.S. Embassy "Muppet."
Giordano is a staunch proponent of drug legalization and receives much of his operating capital from like-minded supporters, including John Gilmore, a California civil libertarian software entrepreneur and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has paid most of his bills since June 2001. Recently, Giordano got an influx of cash when the Tides Foundation approved a $30,000 grant to Narco News. He's earmarked some of that money for scholarships that in February will bring in six "beginning" journalists from both the U.S. and Latin America for a ten-day seminar in southern Mexico, enrolled in what Giordano calls his "school of authentic journalism."
Giordano wears his politics on his sleeve — that's what he means by "authentic journalism." He's a rabble-rouser, printing letters and articles from activists and crackpots, along with unedited communiqués from the Zapatistas and the FARC, the left-wing Colombian rebels whose violence has cost them support even among the Latin American left (he claims FARC once promised him safe passage through their territory).
Most of Giordano's output makes mainstream reporters cringe. His contributors include many of the sweethearts of what might be called the "conspiracy theory" milieu, including the former High Times editor-in-chief Peter Gorman and Catherine Austin Fitts, a former HUD official from the first Bush administration, who has become an outspoken critic of the drug war. And his appearance — ratty clothes and crooked teeth — only adds to his renegade image.
"Narco News skews young. That's my intent," Giordano told me as he clicked through the site, which at the time featured a massive essay crowning the rapper Eminem "journalist of the year." "The very things people think alienate me from certain important audiences are the same things that connect me with the youth. My articles don't speak to the decision-makers, they speak to the people the decision-makers are afraid of."
Yet some pieces on his site, though long-winded and larded with rhetoric, contain solid and incisive reporting. In the first issue, packed mostly with translated articles and accompanying commentary, Giordano posted a story reporting that a Mexican radio journalist gunned down in the border town of Juarez had in fact been on the police payroll. The piece put him on the radar in the U.S. when Jim Romenesko posted a link to it on his MediaNews site, and other mainstream media folks have begun paying attention to Giordano's work. The publicity he's churned up by assuming a watchdog role among journalists in Latin America and his recent involvement in a landmark libel case have further raised his profile.
Last summer, after traveling to Venezuela following that country's failed coup, he took on the Committee to Protect Journalists, blasting the organization for what he characterized as its failure to stand up for embattled community journalists who'd defended president Hugo Chavez and been violently attacked for it. "Do you represent journalists? Or, the media industry?" he wrote in an open letter to CPJ sent in late July, an endless document that accuses the group of defending only mainstream reporters — in particular those who'd lined up against Chavez.
CPJ's Ann Cooper says she found his letter to be less about opening a dialogue and more about "Al Giordano and his policy statements," adding, "A lot of the questions he asked reminded me of the 'when did you stop beating your wife' kinds of questions." Ten days after he posted his letter, CPJ released its report, which Cooper says had been assigned back in May, with a small section on the plight of the pro-Chavez community journalists. Giordano lauded the organization for its good work and then took credit for inspiring it.
His October 2000 conflict-of-interest story on the lobbying work of AP's correspondent in Bolivia led to that reporter's resignation. And he's devoted thousands of words to lambasting American reporters, in particular those of The New York Times.
In the first postings on Narco News, Giordano fired the opening salvos in what would become a protracted and often bitter war with Sam Dillon, the Pulitzer Prize winner who until two years ago was the Times's bureau chief in Mexico City. Giordano challenged the merits of his Pulitzer work and, when the paper announced Dillon's imminent departure from the capital, led with a piece titled "Times Dumps Dillon" that was picked up by several Mexican outlets. "The guy became like a stalker," Dillon told me over the phone from Mexico City, where he was putting the finishing touches on a book he's been writing about Mexican democracy. "Every chance he got he'd write something nasty about me. He said I'd been fired. He just made it up. The guy's a worm, he has absolutely no credibility."
The feud began in February 1999 — more than a year before the birth of Narco News — when both Dillon and Giordano traveled to the Yucatán, near Cancun, where President Bill Clinton and President Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico had convened for a drug summit. Both reporters noticed an incendiary story on the front page of Por Esto!, the upstart local daily, which alleged that the summit's host, the billionaire banker Roberto Hernández — head of Banamex, the country's largest bank — was also a drug trafficker. Giordano, who took the piece seriously, was disturbed to discover that none of its allegations made their way into Dillon's story.
Dillon says the reason is that the story didn't hold up. "As the correspondent for the Times in Mexico, I'd get three or four detailed accusations a week about public officials, faxed or phoned into my office, calling major Mexican figures narcotics traffickers," Dillon says. "I read this story, by a disreputable newspaper, and thought it was all trash. There wasn't a shred of evidence."
Giordano subsequently flogged the Hernandez story on Narco News, hoping mainstream American outlets might pick it up. In the spring of 2001, they began to take notice; Banamex had filed a libel suit in New York state court the previous summer against Giordano and the man who had run the original stories in Mexico, the newspaper publisher Mario Menéndez. Giordano, who claims he didn't find out about the lawsuit until many months after it was filed, says the media attention cast a spotlight on the Hernandez stories Banamex had hoped to squash. "I think the fact that they included me in their case," Giordano says, "turned out to be their worst nightmare."
The suit pitted the powerhouse New York firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld against Giordano's mostly volunteer lawyers — among them the free-speech icon Martin Garbus (who represented Lenny Bruce and Timothy Leary) and Giordano's longtime lawyer from Massachusetts, Tom Lesser. The case drew the attention of several publications, from Rolling Stone to Wired to The Christian Science Monitor, and led to a large increase in traffic to Narco News (Giordano claims more that 18 million hits since Narco News began).
On December 13, 2001, Giordano and Menéndez won their case in a landmark decision that extended the press protections laid out in New York Times v. Sullivan to the online media. At the time, The Christian Science Monitor wrote that a win for Banamex would have created an "enormous chill," deterring "journalists from reporting online about important issues in their countries."
Giordano savored the victory for a few sweet moments, and then jumped back into the fray, posting stories attacking the American ambassador to Bolivia, the DEA, and the new president of Colombia.
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