My name is Nick Kasey. I'm a writer for the New York Times magazine. Mexico is in the

middle of a war against drug traffickers. But there's a second conflict there that you

might not know about. It's a war to silence Mexico's free press.

Last year, Mexico was one of the deadliest places in the world for journalists to work.

Second only to Ukraine. Mexican journalists have faced phone hacks, death threats, beatings,

torture, and in one case, a pair of grenades launched at their newsroom.

Because no one has figured out how to protect journalists where they work, Mexico is resorted

to the extreme step of hiding reporters in safe houses across the country.

What's behind these threats is pretty simple. Many of the reporters under threat were investigating

the government that was supposed to protect them. And many in the government for years

have been on the payroll of Mexico's drug cartels.

Now, imagine you're a reporter in Mexico. How do you do your job when you can't distinguish

between the crime fighters and the criminals? Is this prosecutor I'm speaking to involved

with a crime that I'm reporting? And what will he do to me for writing about it? It's a

hall of mirrors. In Mexico, you're on your own.

This week's Sunday read is my story about a local newsroom in Mexico called the Michoacán

Monitor. The monitor was a small news outlet, just one editor and a few of his friends,

and they decided to investigate corruption in their city government. Soon they started

getting threats. And as you'll hear in this story, some of these threats became real.

But these did not deter Armando de Nadez, the editor in chief of the monitor. And so even

after the photographer of the monitor was murdered outside the newsroom by two masked

salons, Linadez took to Facebook live to address the killing.

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