By LIZZIE WADE From New York Times

Azam Ahmed had been walking for hours in the sweltering humidity of southern Mexico, hiding from the police the whole way, when he realized his long day was about to get longer.

Mr. Ahmed, the New York Times bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, was accompanying 10 men from Guatemala and Honduras who were making the long trek through Mexico to reach the United States. When they arrived at a village where a smuggler had promised a safe house for the night, they found a place that seemed anything but safe. A group of drunk villagers yelled threats, calling the migrants “mojados” — wetbacks. Women whispered warnings about migrants who had been murdered in the safe house. “I’ve been trained, so I’m checking the sight lines in this neighborhood,” Mr. Ahmed says. “Here’s where we are, that’s where those guys were, we can get back to the highway this way, not sure what goes that way.”

In the end, there was no need to get out in a hurry. The group slept fitfully in the safe house and was on the move at 3:30 the next morning.

Mr. Ahmed, 34, is a practiced risk-taker. Before coming to Mexico in June 2015, he was a correspondent and then bureau chief for The Times in Kabul, Afghanistan. Security protocols have become second nature to him. “I’m not just some young student reporter who wants to do a really crazy thing. I understand the 15 things that I need to figure out to mitigate the risk of doing that crazy thing,” he says.

Beyond writing up security plans, however, reporting in Latin America requires a slower and more methodical approach than covering a war zone in the Middle East, Mr. Ahmed says. A war zone imbues straightforward news reporting with life-or-death stakes and obvious global significance. “Those stories often write themselves,” Mr. Ahmed says. But after three years in Afghanistan, Mr. Ahmed was ready to try hunting for news that wasn’t out in the open. “Where can I go and discover the story, not have the story imposed on me?” he remembers thinking. Mexico City seemed like the place, especially since he had studied Spanish in college.

At least that’s how Mr. Ahmed felt before Nov. 8. “Before Trump, it wasn’t all news all the time,” he says. “Trump has taken a stance vis-à-vis Mexico that we have to explore the implications of.” That has meant more daily reports on politics and fewer 40-mile treks with migrants. When we talked in March, Mr. Ahmed hadn’t left Mexico City for a few months, and he was counting the days until he could get on the road again, perhaps to Cuba, El Salvador or Haiti, or any of the 12 countries he is in charge of covering. Before the election, he often found himself on the road for weeks — even months — at a time. “I don’t ever get too comfortable in one place because I’m always moving,” Mr. Ahmed says. “But at the same time, I love the momentum.”

Still, the new spotlight on Mexico has helped Mr. Ahmed see some of the country’s contradictions more clearly. As President Enrique Peña Nieto calls for the United States to respect the rights of Mexican citizens, for example, a close ally in his party introduced a bill that would roll back the protections granted to defendants in the judicial system and potentially allow the admission of evidence obtained through torture. Meanwhile, 98 percent of homicides in Mexico go unsolved. “If you dig deep enough on any problem in this country, you will probably find impunity at the base of it,” Mr. Ahmed says.

Mr. Ahmed feels all the more compelled to do that digging because he knows his colleagues in the Mexican media, who face censorship and threats, often cannot. “It’s incumbent on us to do the kinds of stories that they can’t do,” he says. (In his latest article, Mr. Ahmed reports on just how dangerous the country is for reporters: Eleven Mexican journalists were killed last year.) His articles also amplify the voices of those left out of official narratives, such as the Central American migrants, and can challenge the president and the military, both of which are “third rails” for the Mexican press. His insistence on portraying the country’s harsh reality means his editor has received more than one call from an angry Mexican government official. “Let somebody else write the happy story,” he says.

IMAGE: Azam Ahmed, The Times’s bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, walking with migrants through Mexico. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

For more on this story go to: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/29/insider/mexicos-contradictions-trump-azam-ahmed-profile.html?_r=0