By MARC LACEY

REYNOSA, Mexico - The big philosophical question in this gritty border town does not concern trees falling in the forest but bodies falling on the concrete: Does a shootout actually happen if the newspapers print nothing about it, the radio and television stations broadcast nothing, and the authorities never confirm that it occurred?

As two powerful groups of drug traffickers engaged in fierce urban combat in Reynosa in recent weeks, the reality that many residents were living and the one that the increasingly timid news media and the image-conscious politicians portrayed were difficult to reconcile.

“You begin to wonder what the truth is,” said one of Reynosa’s frustrated and fearful residents, Eunice Pena, a professor of communications. “Is it what you saw, or what the media and the officials say? You even wonder if you were imagining it.”

Angry residents who witnessed the carnage began to fill the void, posting raw videos and photos taken with cellphones.

“The pictures do not lie,” said a journalist in McAllen, Texas, who monitors what is happening south of the border online but has stopped venturing there himself. “You can hear the gunshots. You can see the bodies. You know it’s bad.”

The Mexican government’s drug offensive, employing tens of thousands of soldiers, marines and federal police officers, has unleashed ever increasing levels of violence over the last three years as traffickers have fought to protect their lucrative smuggling routes. On March 13, gunmen believed to be linked to drug traffickers shot a pregnant American consulate worker and her husband to death in the violence-racked border town of Ciudad Juarez. The gunmen also killed the husband of another consular employee and wounded his two young children.

Journalists have also long been among the victims, but the attacks on members of the news media under way in Reynosa and elsewhere along a long stretch of border from Nuevo Laredo to Matamoros are at their worst.

Traffickers have gone after journalists with a vengeance in these strategic border towns where drugs are smuggled across by the ton. They have shot up newsrooms, kidnapped and killed staff members and called up news oganizations regularly with threats that were not the least bit veiled. Back off, the thugs said. Do not dare print our names. We will kill you the next time you publish a photograph like that.

“They mean what they say,” said one of the many terrified journalists who used to cover the police beat in Reynosa. “I’m censoring myself. There’s no other way to put it. But so is everybody else.”

When they are not issuing threats, journalists say, the drug runners are buying off reporters with cash and romps with prostitutes. The traffickers are not always so press shy. When they post banners on bridges expounding on their twisted view of the world or commit some particularly gory crime, they often seek out coverage.

But not now.

And the current news blackout along the border has only amplified fears, as false rumors of impending shootouts circulate unchecked, prompting many parents to pull their children from school and businesses to close.

It means that a mother can huddle on the floor of a closet with her daughter for what seems like eternity as fierce gunfire is exchanged outside their home, as occurred here recently, and then find not a word of it in the next day’s paper.

And it means that helicopters can swoop overhead, military vehicles can roar through the streets and the entire neighborhood can sound like a war movie, and television can lead off the next day’s broadcast talking about something else.

Even some officials, including Mayor Oscar Lubbert of Reynosa, acknowledge that without news reports, it is harder for them to get a full picture of how much blood is spilled overnight, partly because the traffickers sometimes haul their dead comrades away before the sun comes up.

The Texas press broke the story that the Drug Enforcement Administration traced the upsurge in violence in Reynosa to January 18, when a member of the Gulf Cartel killed a top lieutenant of the rival Zeta gang named Victor Mendoza.

The Zetas, founded by former members of the Mexican special forces and known for both their organization and their brutality, demanded the killer. The Gulf Cartel, which once used the Zetas as enforcers but now vows to eliminate them, refused.

In the weeks that followed, fierce shootouts broke out along long stretches of the border, and the local reporters went silent.

“Before, if there was a shootout, the scene would be full of journalists,” said one of the many reporters who has given up covering the drug war here out of fear and who insisted on anonymity for the same reason. “Now, sometimes there will not be a single journalist. Everyone stays away.”

The violence and what it has done to journalists has become, by necessity, a part of journalism instruction along the border.

At one Reynosa university, communications professors talk about the importance of staying neutral and how it can be deadly to take sides. They also steer their students, until the climate along the border changes, into jobs covering politics, culture or sports. Anything but crime.


Mexican troops in Escobedo detaining wounded men suspected of belonging to a gang that had been in a shootout. / TOMAS BRAVO/REUTERS