Lucas - Short Fiction

The daily fear


I had dreamed of becoming a journalist. Perhaps the reason of it was my mother when she said that “truth is the first of values” – normally after some mischief. However, the more I grew up, the more I realized that in your daily lives we are set to compromise with truth. From this painful contradiction my career would be traced.
Journalism, the big one, is my life choice. Besides the difficult nature of the job, I had to come down with another ugly fact: I chose the most dangerous job in my country. In the last ten years, more than two hundred journalists have been murdered (or simply “disappeared”) due to their work as “truth-seekers”. Roberto B., who was shot dead in front of his family last year by drug-dealers, once said to me that “Here in Ciudad Juárez we journalists have two possibilities, either compromise with truth, or with fear”. Once more I faced the contradiction.
After five long years studying in foreign countries, I came back last year to become a journalist in CJ. What was my surprise when I found out the obvious fact that all the newspapers of the city are owned by the same person. Mister A. Maya. “Things go like this nowadays”, I thought, It is the effects of globalization and monopoly”. However, when I received an email inviting me to a job interview in the very house of Mister A. Maya, owner of Ciudad Juárez Daily News and all means of communication as far as El Passo Texas, I had to stop believing.
Here everybody knows the source of CJ’s violence. It is an intricate system entangling a failed State, global corporations hunger for cheap labor force for the “maquiladoras”, and bundles of outlaws who fight for taking control of coca’s routes to the US. How do all these things fix together? I have no idea. But if there is a Truth, it is our duty to look for it.
When the piece of white paper in front of me asked to fill in the blanks with my full name, and my social security number, I gave one more step toward desolation. After all the ‘writing text’ of CJ Daily News would be just another mise en scene for hiring biased journalists. Either work, or your conviction. Either truth, or safely sleep. Probably my roommates – who would know exactly how to fill in suchblanks – were “son of someone” or just a father trying desperately to feed his newborn children. Who knows? What I know is there is no place for ambiguities in this job. Either you are a journalist, or you aren’t. Either you live by their rules, or you live with fear. I made my choice.

In the most optimistic scenery, which is a hollywoodian one in fact, I’ll become famous delivering encouraging speech worldwide for (ironically) the coca consumers of Ciudad Juárez. I received one or two awards, and a polite nomination to running for the Pulitz. My death would be quickly and abroad. A soft end for somenone who let his hometown dying slowing in the desert. In the worst scenery… well… nobody knows how Mister A. Maya will received the news that a “rebellious” and “trouble-seeker” candidate named Carlos B. has used his failed writing text for application in CJ Daily News to illustrate the first page of the brave new newspaper of Ciudad Juarez: The Daily Truth.
I have to face the fact that my life is in danger now. But I don’t care. I have chosen the Juarez daily fear. As everyone else.