Ten orbits around the sun: LareDOS marks a decade in print

By María Eugenia Guerra

Publisher

About a month ago I was part of a panel of journalists who spoke in Nuevo Laredo before the organization of International Reporters and Editors (IRE). My co-panelists that day were two other women enamored of the printed word and the freedom of expression -- the owner of El Mañana Ninfa Deandar Cantu and the editor of the Laredo Morning Times Diana Fuentes.

In the week prior to the conference I'd collected my thoughts about how I felt about LareDOS and how I define the publication's role in our community and my own role in its 10-year history in print.

Though the three of us sat side by side on the panel for a couple of hours and shared the most personal and passionate details about reportage and running a newspaper, none of us had given a thought that it was women at the helm of these three sources of news at this bend in the river. A journalist from Monclova pointed that out to us just before the panel discussion ended.

Don't take this as an offering of faux humble pie, but understand that I do recognize that I am and LareDOS is what it has always been -- the little player in this journalistic trifecta. Ninfa and Deedee have ink delivered into their buildings in 55-gallon drums, forklifts carry their rolls of newsprint, and they have departments, staffs, presses the size of 18-wheelers, and circulations and advertising sales that pay for those things.

We are what we seem always to have been -- four or five of us putting together a 72-page monthly news journal for a readership of about 10,000 Laredoans and a modest out of town audience.

I've always wondered what it was like to have come across the first issue of LareDOS. It didn't look like a newspaper and in many respects it didn't read like one. Some said it was cheeky. Others said it wasn't really a newspaper. Many said it would have no life beyond a few issues, and some in this community worked mightily to ensure a short, unhappy life for LareDOS.

When Laredenses read that first issue, they may not have known in full what they were looking at. Besides reading a publication that was well written and that took the time and space to tell an entire story -- as opposed to as much of the story as would fit on a page before the ads were set in place -- they were reading for the first time since the days of Jovita Idar's La Cronica a newspaper that had substance, a heart, and a point of view. They were reading from the pages of advocacy journalism.

I won't tell you that my former partner and co-founder Richard Geissler and I set out with so lofty a stated mission, but advocacy journalism is what came out in the sift as we poured our 60s and 70s idealism into news stories.

The earliest issues of LareDOS evidence that we had something to say about the environment and about the spending of public money for education.

Because of our tabloid look, our sometimes-edgy cover art, our ability to scoop the daily now and again, and our in-depth substance which begged questions about the judicious spending of the public nickel, we were labeled the “alternative” press and were likened to the Austin Chronicle. I thought it was because we used spell check.

Long before any other local publication took up the cause, LareDOS routinely hammered the EPA, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (now the TCEQ), and local government for the lack of oversight for the Río Grande and its tributaries. We linked illegal dumpsites on Manadas Creek, a major tributary to the river, to the corporate citizen who left oil, batteries, and hazardous waste on the creek bed, embarrassing both the corporate citizen and the city department that turned a blind eye to gross violations of local, state, and federal law. At that time the City of Laredo cleaned its creeks by praying for a heavy rainfall that would carry tonnage of dumped garbage and toxins into the Río Grande.

We hammered warehouses that had in their yards and on their docks unlabeled 55-gallon drums of substances that oozed and ran off in the rain. We ran pictures in LareDOS and told our readers the name and address of the warehouser. When nothing was done, we ran them again, and again.

One such warehouse was across the street from a Little League ballpark on Hillside. The warehouser maintained that the drums contained just a little lecithin that had gone bad. In our investigation, we discovered what we had always suspected, that the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission was anything but a conservator of the environment. It and its bean-counting agents, hapless investigators, and petty bureaucrats were in lockstep with the business community, in service to lower the environmental bar and to show businesses how to comply with already lax environmental standards.

The TNRCC's mission to protect the environment fell second to helping business stay in business. The state agency mandated to protect the environment was in fact a business development foundation.

We were relentless about that warehouse, and the TNRCC formulated a little task force with the city's community development department. They may have found liquid lecithin in some of the oozing drums, but they also found hydrochloric acid in a yellow re-pack drum on a loading dock, a discovery caught on video during one of the task force's “raids,” a video that was bootlegged to us at LareDOS. The TNRCC also found some radioactive washing machines from the nuclear power plant in Veracruz. The warehouser was fined and the drums and washing machines were eventually removed. That bootleg video shows members of that task force, Geiger counter in hand, shouting expletives and running from those washing machines.

We didn't limit our coverage to stories and photographs. Our political satirists Cholulah Bankhead and Kay Wavos embarrassed public officials into action. Oh how they laughed until they got to the part about themselves. It has been said that LareDOS has always been an equal opportunity offender.

We once came across and photographed and published on our cover a lagoon in the monte the unnatural color of Windex, a lagoon just off the warehouse-dense Mines Road. You could draw a straight line from that lagoon to the porta-toilet company just up the hill. You could. I could, but the city could not -- despite the perfect match for the color of the blue lagoon and the chemical used in portable toilets -- for the owner of the porta-toilet company enjoyed city contracts and was a major contributor to the campaigns of local elected officials.

We have taken the state of Texas, the International Boundary and Water Commission, the EPA, the City of Laredo, and Nuevo Laredo to task for raw sewage outfalls that cascaded and continue to cascade into the Río Grande despite the inauguration of the much-touted $50 million dollar state of the art Nuevo Laredo sewage treatment plant. We have also taken them to task for their failure to act on the horrifying data of all the taxpayer funded bi-national studies they have conducted. We have rubbed their collective noses in it, and yet the flow continues today.

So how long does the hammering in newsprint have to go on before a city establishes an environmental services department -- seven years. Much longer than it takes a school district to begin obeying its own travel and property acquisition policies.

In 1995, the Laredo Independent School District was run as a monarchy and so much of our early investigative focus was on the District's expenditures on the downtown magnet school for lavish paint schemes, antiques, and festive banners on brass poles, travel, and items that had nothing to do with books, teachers, students, or learning technology. The wives of the administrators and school board members routinely accompanied their husbands on out-of-state group trips at the expense of the taxpayers. Some of the wives, who also worked for the district as teachers or clerks, were not docked pay for the time they were out of town on these trips to New York, San Diego, DC, and Albuquerque, to name a few cities. Some of those administrators and trustees turned in reimbursement requests for stays at expensive resorts and meals that cost as much as $700, and included the purchase of alcoholic beverages. Because there were no rooms in San Diego, we were told, they had to stay at the Sheraton Torrey Pines in La Jolla. Because there were no rooms in Burlington, Vermont, they had to cross the Canadian border to stay in Montreal. Their explanations were outlandish, the paper trail excellent, because they hoarded their receipts and turned them in dutifully. They kept excellent records of their bad spending practices, thinking there would be no challenge to their expenses. The more they spent, the more they were reimbursed.

The school district responded to our stories with a slow fury that advised its vendors it would be best not to advertise with us. Beyond that, the school district or a very disgruntled party in the district sent a piece of hate mail about me to public officials, my parents, my advertisers. It was made to look like a funeral notice. There was so much hate on that little piece of paper.

I had the pleasure at this time to work with Sharon Simonson, a writer for the Laredo Morning Times. We never collaborated on a story, but we were excellent contemporaries after many of the same stories. We encouraged each other and very much respected that one or the other of us had found an edge on a story. LareDOS has also enjoyed an excellent relationship with El Mañana, a publication whose level of professionalism in its staff writers has been a constant.

About seven years after we began publication, the Times picked up the banner and began to run stories about the environment. We were very happy to have drawn the map for them, for their audience is far larger than ours.

When the United States Border Patrol raped the trees and foliage from the river vega and the American banks of the Río Grande with the assistance of the Army Corps of Engineers and the blessing of the Laredo City Council, we warned them that their practices could lead to tonnage of silt being dumped into the river if there was a major flood event. A year later when their road ended up in the river in a major flood event, we photographed them in their cars that looked like toys next to washed out craters bigger than football fields. Don't get me started about the Border Patrol and what they do on private property in the name of drug interdiction and stemming the tide of undocumented immigrants.

I am a native Laredoan, but I lived away from here for 20 years, which I believe has given me the detachment and distance to be able to write about this place that formed all my thoughts and my heart. Had I never left, I wonder that I would have had the gumption to look at all the terrible ironies of the frontera and to write about them -- the extremes of the haves and the have nots -- the wealth that NAFTA has brought to few contrasted with the hideous living conditions of colonia residents. The beauty of this river and its significance not only as the only source of drinking water here but also its prominence in our family histories contrasted with the utter disregard of two cities, two states, two nations. The river is why we are here, and yet we refuse to take responsibility for its stewardship.

Laredo, Texas is a very conservative town. Sometimes I think we like to whisper our scandals rather than see them in headlines; though once the cat is out of the bag, the headlines are like catnip. This is a town that often would rather look away from wrongdoing than call it by its rightful name. It is a town that suffers scoundrels.

At LareDOS we have never thrown rocks and then hidden our hands behind our backs. If we lobbed something at a public figure in the public arena, we had a sheaf of documents in our hands. We've never been for hire to slay personal dragons, and you can't buy the front page of LareDOS. It's never been for sale and neither has our point of view, though that hasn't stopped a couple of intrepid souls from asking.

We've given credit where credit was due. The establishment of the City's Environmental Service Department is the work of forward thinking leadership.

On occasion we've eaten crow. Though we led the charge against the City's push to build the Laredo Entertainment Center, we can see that it has great value for many Laredoans. (I've yet to attend a hockey game, but members of my family enjoy it.)

We've written about public officials who act with impunity, people who violate the rights of others, a fire chief who was a sexual and religious harasser. We exposed a City Attorney who was conducting private practice from his City Hall office. Several of our stories have lead to “career changes” or “early retirements” for some public officials, which is the Laredo way of saying, “You're fired.”

Some will say we ruined their lives, but really all we were doing was documenting acts that violated the public trust. It was they who called our attention. We've written about hospitals and physicians who through their alleged negligence have wreaked great harm and sadness on the lives of others.

We've taken issue with pompous public leaders, quoting verbatim their outrageous pronouncements and dressing them in ermine robes as King Louis XIV for the cover of LareDOS.

I've been offered one bribe, and when I said “No thanks,” the mother of the man about to make the cover story called to ask me to re-consider running the story. The flip side of a bribe is a threat.

For the first time in 10 years, I am being sued for something that I wrote, and certainly this has made me look at how I do my work and made me ever more mindful of how important it is to work from documents, which is my by-rote practice.

We've never endorsed a political candidate, though there have been a handful we wished mightily would win. In the recent presidential election, we didn't endorse John Kerry as much as we offered what we felt were good arguments not to re-elect George Bush. We paid dearly for the exercise of our First Amendment freedom in the November 2004 issue and lost advertisers who forgot how hard we had worked together to clean up a school district a few years back. Fair weather friends, my father would have called them with a scowl.

This is a synopsis of the short, happy life of a little newspaper that values open records and has a great love for the voice of the unencumbered press.

Though rumors of our demise have circulated with some regularity over the last decade, we're still here, thanks to the kindness of some friends and a few total strangers who wish to remain unnamed, Commerce Bank who didn't pull the plug on us when it seemed to be in their best interest to do so, and Renato Ramirez at IBC Zapata.

Don't be thinking we've got it made in the shade. Every month our bank statement affirms our corporate name, ShuString Productions, Inc. It still hurts to pay the printing bill, and it's not unusual that we're but a step ahead of the phone bill or the electric bill.

To be frank, though much has changed about LareDOS, much has remained the same. It's still Tom and me still trying to figure out why the remaining ten percent left to put the paper to bed issue after issue can take longer than the finished 90 percent did to complete. In the first five years in publication, we entered journalism contests and won. That has seemed less important as our work has appeared in other publications.

Do I have any regrets? I regret that my father is not here to toast our tenth orbit around the sun. I regret that when I bought out my partner, and once my very good friend, Richard Geissler, that he opted never to speak to me again.