A Reporter at Large - The Bunker

A covert operation to solve the murder of one of Mexico's bravest investigative journalists.

- By Melissa Del Bosque. Photography by Natalie Keyssar

For nearly two decades, Miroslava Breach documented cartel crimes and political corruption in her home state of Chihuahua. A monument to justice stands near her former office, in the state capital.

The journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea was born in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, in a mountainous region that the U.S. government has called the Golden Triangle of drug trafficking and that Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, would prefer to be known as the Triangle of Good, Hardworking People. In the late nineteen-sixties, when Breach was a child, she was drawn to the ancient pine forests of the Sierra Tarahumara, near her home town of Chínipas de Almada. By the time she was an adult, however, many of those magical forests had been razed. Laborers would eventually turn some of the clearings into poppy fields and marijuana plantations. Later, as more trees fell, fentanyl and methamphetamine labs rose up, the better to satisfy American demand.

Much of the narcotics industry in the Sierra Tarahumara is controlled by the Salazars, a cartel that took form in Chínipas. The Salazars pay for baptisms and funerals; they kill activists and journalists when their interests are threatened; and they monitor communications throughout their territory, which extends into the neighboring state of Sonora. Many reporters are afraid to venture in. But Breach drove the treacherous alpine roads of the Sierra in broad daylight, in a cherry-red S.U.V.

For nearly two decades, she documented cartel crimes and political corruption that most residents would discuss only in whispers, and published what she’d discovered in La Jornada, a national newspaper, and Norte de Ciudad Juárez,