NEWSLETTER

How is the new version different?

The magazine itself hasn’t changed much over the years. In essence it’s the exact same magazine Don Carlos dreamed of. We’ve had a lot of internal discussions when people have wanted to change the design, but I’ve always fought to keep it very simple. People enjoy it the way it is, and it makes it a quick, easy read. We’re not a modern, artsy magazine, and that’s not what our readers want us to be. We just try to keep it very simple and very visual. If there are no pictures there’s no story. Our readers like to see pictures.

Yeah, why is that? What’s the fascination with photos of headless corpses and the like?

People are interested in the kind of thing we publish. I don’t think it’s an illness—I think it’s curiosity. People like to see what we’re made of inside. We have millions of photographs of cadavers with their intestines hanging out. There’s kilos and kilos of intestines stuffed in there. It’s really strange, and lots of people love to see that. Plus, if we don’t publish enough dead bodies in an issue we get emails telling us that we were too conservative.

That’s funny. I’d imagine you got more from people saying you were too sensational.

Oh, that too. A lot of people write us off for being too sensational, but none of the information that we publish is made up. It’s all absolutely factual and true. We don’t make up facts and we don’t retouch photographs. There’s no need to.

What kind of story works best for you?

The types of crimes that we’re reporting have changed a bit. The stories that work best for us now are narco-traffic crime stories, for example the decapitated bodies they recently found in Acapulco. In Michoacan, five people had their heads blown off while they were dancing in a nightclub. That kind of piece really works for us.

It seems like most of your stories come from the cities.

Actually, most of our stories right now are coming from Michoacan and Guerrero. Last year it was Tamaulipas, and five years ago it was Culiacán. It’s really interesting to see how the crime wave moves around the country. For example, I’m surprised that Culiacán isn’t more violent. Around 2001 we counted up to 1,000 executions in a couple of months there. It’s also interesting to see how the crimes are getting more violent. It used to just be drive-by shootings. Now the victims are always decapitated or buried alive. The crimes are getting more and more depraved.



I wonder why that is.

Because they want to instill more fear in others. “If I kill you more violently, then your people will respect me more,” or something like that. Because most of the crimes are drug related, I think they need to scare each other more and more to secure areas.

My dad was a police officer and said the same thing, that drug crimes are generally more violent than other crimes.

Drug-related crimes are very different from crimes of passion. If you look at older issues of Alarma! most of the stories are crimes of passion, with headlines like “He killed her for being a flirt.”

That used to be our bread and butter. Now the headlines are really different, but that also has to do with the fact that we have to be more delicate with our choice of words.

How so?

Don Carlos used to pick some great words. For example, to refer to homosexuals, he used to say “los mujercitos” [“little women” in the masculine form] and lesbians were “hombrecitas”—the reverse. We can’t use these kinds of words anymore because everyone thinks you’re violating their human rights if you do.

Strangely enough, Alarma! has never been sued, but for safe measure, we now try to keep our humor a bit less dark. We’ve basically gone from black to gray.

What stories are you working on right now?

This week we actually had four different crimes of passion in Mexico City. I’m running out of ideas for the headlines.

Ha. Well, tell me one of the headlines.

One of the crimes was a man who killed his wife. They were both schoolteachers and he killed her in front of her students, so I came up with a headline that hopefully isn’t too offensive and doesn’t make fun of the situation but will still spark people’s interest. It reads, “He got an A in homicide.”

Gold.

These are the type of ideas that Don Carlos left us with. He used to have a lot of fun doing his job. He was very passionate about it. For example, another crime we had this week that was kind of amusing was a man who shot his wife in the head while she was in the bathroom using the toilet. Don Carlos would’ve really enjoyed writing that headline.


EL NUEVO ALARMA! IS MEXICO’S BEST CRIME TABLOID... | 1 | 2 |

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