Journalist Luis Chaparro Explains the Tragedy That Triggered His Career as Border Chronicler

Luis Chaparro grew up among the wealthy citizens of Ciudad Juárez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. But far from the glittery lifestyle of friends and neighbors, he was attracted to the grittier side of life, and he witnessed it firsthand 15 years ago when five of his friends were murdered at a bar, and he narrowly escaped death. Luis was supposed to be there that night, but a nap from working too hard writing news saved his life.

Luis now spends his life as a journalist, intimately covering cartels, and apart from loving what he does, he said he partly became a journalist because he wanted to find out why his friends were murdered.

"To be perfectly honest, I think that is what threw me into this rabbit hole for the last 15 fucking years, you know, trying to understand why," Luis in an interview with The Latin Times. "At some point, I was trying hard to go to every single court date and read all the news about killings and sicarios (hitmen) arrested, and all the police shootouts, trying to find details about someone who could tell me what happened, and eventually, it became just part of what I do."

Investigating that, Luis said, led him to write a story about the murders, and his career turned to writing and documenting life along the border, finding sources that led him to write about Mexican cartels.

Privileges forgotten

Luis was born in Ciudad Juárez, the bordering city across El Paso, Texas. He says he lived in a sheltered gated community away from the rougher parts of Juárez. Growing up there in the 90s, he says late drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes (The Lord of the Skies), whose family lived there, did indeed cast a shadow all over town. Because Luis's mother was a doctor and his father was a lawyer, he said he had a different childhood than most local kids because he lived in an upper-class part of the city.

Although there was a lot of cartel violence in Juárez in the 90s, Luis wasn't exposed to it, but he did brush shoulders with the Carrillo Fuentes family as a kid. Luis said he remembers going to one of the most expensive private elementary schools with one of the sons of Carrillo Fuentes. His name was "Andrés." He said Andrés was a quiet kid and didn't suspect anything was different about him other than his parents never visited him at school.

Luis said Andrés was always with bodyguards going into school and leaving instead of being picked up and dropped off at school by his parents. His sister was also in class with another child of Carrillo Fuentes. Although Amado was almost never in their elementary school, most likely due to his high status as a narco, Luis said he saw him at school once.

"I only saw him one time in school. It was in the morning. It was a catholic school, so we had to do our prayings in the morning, and then he knocked on the door, and he asked the teacher for Andresito. He was saying some goodbyes," Luis said. "It was weird because he was wearing one of these weird 90s Versace shirts that were very popular amongst narcos back then, and he had two other guys with him, probably bodyguards. He said bye, and he [Andrés] came back excited, and we never saw [Carrillo Fuentes] him again."

At the time, Luis said he had no idea who Carrillo Fuentes was. But, as he got older, Luis said he started to realize what had been happening and asked his parents, and they told him "yes" it was Carrillo Fuentes. He said that eventually, Andrés stopped going to school, and he never saw him again.

Seeing both sides of life

Growing up, Luis said he had friends whose families were very poor and going to their homes and meeting their relatives gave him a fascination with this other side of life he didn't know.

Luis said when he was around 15-years-old, he was really into punk shows, and he would drink bootleg beer and got into drugs very young. He said he could go and be in these dangerous situations, but then he got to go home to a nice gated community with a nanny and no worries about anything financially. He said his friends who lived in the poorer neighborhoods were amazed when they would come to his home and see how different his life was.

Eventually, those same friends became his first sources in the narco world.

"I was absolutely attracted by that kind of life, and probably because it was the opposite of what I was facing at home," Luis said. "That gave me my first set of sources. A lot of those guys became drug dealers and eventually narcos and they got involved more in the criminal aspect."

Luis said this quickly got him to places that usually took a lot of work for journalists to reach with a camera or even a notebook. A lot of his friends went on to make money through illegal activities, but Luis instead chose to go to college and become a journalist.

It was in college that Luis strayed away from the life of being involved with narcos and instead focused on college, working at the newspaper El Diario in Juárez and freelancing for Agencia EFE, a news agency based in Spain. During this time, one night, while shooting a video for college, Luis ran into friends he grew up with who felt like he was ditching them for his rich friends. Luis said that wasn't the case, and he just was so busy with school and working, but he agreed to go out to a bar with them that night.

That was the last time Luis would ever speak to those friends, and due to being exhausted from all his work, he took a nap before going out with them and overslept. He then got a call at two in the morning from his boss telling him to go cover some murders that happened near his home.

The night Luis Chaparro was supposed to die

"I showed up, there was already a lot of police, and it was a fucking mess, you know, and when I got closer, I couldn't really see what was happening inside the bar, so I had the photographer show me photos, and I looked at the photos, and he zoomed in, and I recognized one of my friends, and another one, and then his girlfriend and another one," Luis said. "They were absolutely riddled with bullets. And I was like, 'Fuck, these are my friends,' and they were still taking the bodies out, and another friend who told me he was bartending at another bar was literally still holding the body of his brother, crying. They had to put him in handcuffs because he was losing his fucking mind."

Luis said he went home feeling confused and guilty. He thought he didn't want to cover the story but still wanted to figure out what happened that night. He said the murders of his friends made him realize that something was happening in his country right before him in his city.

Luis said these murders hit him hard, especially his questioning of why this happened. He said there were different versions in the news, so he started going to many hitmen's court dates, trying to see if they were involved in the murder of his friends. Then he began asking people who were there the night what happened.

Luis said he talked to the brother of one of the murdered friends, and he told Luis in detail what happened, but he still couldn't understand why. Another person told Luis his friends got into a fight at another bar, and another person said someone was selling cocaine and someone else told him it was a mistaken identity case. After this, Luis ended up with a version about the murders of his friends and a lead on another story related to cartels. After that, Luis sunk his life into journalism, and every time he would interview sources, he would ask them if they knew anything about what happened that night.

Luis said he recently interviewed one of the top narcos in the world, and he asked him if he knew who did what happened that night. Luis said he doesn't even think of being in harm's way if the narco doesn't like that he asked that. He just thinks he might finally know who killed his friends, and he could move on from covering cartels.

"My first question was, 'Hey man. Do you remember when Juárez was going through this and that,' and I asked him directly, 'Do you recall anything about this night at this bar?' He just said, 'I don't think so, man. We sent a lot of people, but I was in another country.' He was one of the leaders of an organization back then, but he was not in the street shootings; he was tapped in the life," Luis said. "I told him, while you were out living your life, because we're about the same age, while you were out there partying, living the life or whatever in another country, five of my friends were killed in my city, man."