Covering the drug trade in Mexico has come at a high cost for award-winning investigative journalist and author Anabel Hernández.
Following the publication of her first book in 2010, Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers, she received multiple death threats and was forced to move to the US.
After investigating and writing A Massacre in Mexico: The True Story Behind the Missing Forty-Three Students, which delved into the disappearance of 43 students at the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College in the state of Guerrero in 2014, she was forced to live in exile in Europe.
Ahead of her highly-anticipated appearance at the Sydney Writers Festival, she spoke to SBS Spanish about the tentacles of Mexico's powerful Sinaloa cartel; the symbiosis between governments and cartels; the drug market's responsibility in Mexican deaths and the image of drug traffickers in popular culture.
International drug market and Mexican deaths
The year of 2017 was Mexico's deadliest on record with 29,168 murders recorded, which was higher than the homicide rate at the peak of the country's drug war in 2011. Official estimates indicate that 85 people are killed in that country every day, a rate which is above other countries where the drug trade is significant, including Colombia and Nicaragua.
Ms Hernández, who has been the recipient of numerous awards including the 2012 Golden Pen of Freedom Award, says that along with drug cartels and corrupt government officials, the consumer market is just as much to blame for the violence and deaths.
"Every gram of cocaine, methamphetamine or heroin [consumed] helps kill a Mexican, as is the case of the disappeared of Ayotzinapa, [a fact] that is linked to the issue of drug trafficking," she says.
"Everyone cried out [for the deaths in Mexico] however, it is a consequence of the drug market that wants to satisfy these services at the expense of Mexicans."
As an investigative journalist, Ms Hernández has been front and centre covering and investigating Mexican cartels, including the arrest, extradition and US trial of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the former head of the infamous Sinaloa cartel.
Authorities escort Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, center, from a plane to a waiting caravan of SUVs at Long Island MacArthur Airport. Source: AAP
'Narcos'
She believes programs such as the Netflix series 'Narcos' do not help in the fight against drug trafficking - instead, she says they glorify the traffickers and create a reality that does not exist.
"A few years ago, Netflix was looking for me to be a consultant for the 'Narcos' series, which in fact sadly was a phenomenon."
Ms Hernández says she requested for Netflix to include facts about the CIA's alleged involvement in the drug trade, but was rejected.
Regarding popular culture, the journalist says she is "disgusted" that the bosses of drug trafficking mafias such as former Juarez cartel head Amado Carrillo Fuentes and "El Chapo" were portrayed as "great gallants" when in reality they were "grotesque beings" and that fictional stories "distort things" and "promote a culture of violence".
The 'untouchable' new 'king of drugs'
Following in the US, Ms Hernández says kingpin Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada has by all signs succeeded as leader of the Sinaloa cartel and emerged as a character that will be more powerful than any other major drug boss in the "narco-state" of Mexico.
"I'm making a new book about 'the king of drugs' in the world. Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada is the one who has finally stayed with the entire Sinaloa empire. Even though 'El Chapo' Guzmán is in prison in the United States, this cartel seems to be in its most buoyant period," she says.
Zambada is a former agricultor, who was born on January 1, 1948. It's been reported that he has undergone several surgeries to avoid recognition by the authorities and has allegedly been in the drug business since the 1970s.
Source: DEA
"He is the untouchable drug trafficker of the last four decades of organised crime in Mexico. We are talking about a man who has never been to jail and who has always found a way to buy, to put in his pocket, all the officials of the government of Mexico. [These officials] have helped him, they sit with him to eat, they visit him in their homes.”
Ms Hernández remarks that the Sinaloa cartel was a monster of "a thousand heads", and that Zambada maintains a low profile that has helped the cartel's business grow in Mexico.
Addiction, legalisation and the US opioid crisis
Ms Hernández says if the use of drugs such as cocaine and amphetamines are legalised, the problem of drug trafficking will not be solved, but would instead hand pharmaceutical companies more power.
She points to the opioid analgesics crisis in the US, which has caused the deaths of tens of thousands over the past decade, which has been labelled as the worst crisis of drug use in "the history of mankind".
The situation forced President Donald Trump to allocate funds for the fight against prescription painkilling addiction, including medicines like OxyContin or Vicodin.
President Trump reveals plan to combat opiod drug problem in US calling for tougher penalties for dealers. Source: AAP
"DEA and the US government statistics show that the majority of those killed by drug overdoses and addicts are not killed by the drug trafficked by Mexicans, Colombians or any criminal organisation, (they) are those who were produced by pharmaceutical companies and were sold on the black market with false prescriptions," she says.
"Can we dream that cocaine or methamphetamine or heroin can be controlled at some time? The big risk is yes. The cartels may disappear, but the pharmaceutical companies will become increasingly powerful, they will concentrate more money and more power, and people will be more and more vitiated and will depend more and more on this type of drug."
