The journalist reconstructs his assassination attempt, the chaos of the moment, the six months that have passed, the president’s attacks, and the stalled investigation: “Someone tried to kill me. I don’t know who, I don’t know why.”
Alejandro Santos Cid
It was a quick and confusing 12 seconds. The clock struck 23:10 on Thursday, December 15, and Ciro Gómez Leyva was driving home. Half the country had just seen him, like every day from Monday to Friday, present the news of the day on Imagen Televisión. Tecoyotitla Street was down with some traffic. It was the week before Christmas, the week of company dinners and last-minute shopping. He thinks he tried to overtake the car that was slowing him down. He heard horns. Everything happened quickly from that moment on. When he realized they were shooting at him, he was already on top of them. A motorcycle with two people accelerated and pulled in front of him. One of them twisted his body: that is the image that the journalist remembers most, that of a man turned towards him, pointing a gun at his head while the motorcycle lurched. He also remembers that there was a lot of light. A sparkle of pastel colors, whites, blues, and oranges. The bike came to rest under a lamppost. “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” nine dry shots embedded themselves in the armored glass of the vehicle, in the bodywork, in the tires. The motorcycle stumbled.
-It crunched and took off at a speed that seemed to me like the special effects in the first Star Wars movies. Remember how ships used to get lost in a vanishing point?
This is how Gómez Leyva describes it six months later. One of the most famous journalists in the country had just suffered an attack 200 meters from his home in southern Mexico City. Now, one afternoon in June, Gómez Leyva remembers it in a calm, slow, serene voice, sitting in his office at the Imagen Televisión newsroom a while before presenting the evening news.
-Someone tried to kill me. I don’t know who, I don’t know why. And that night, I was lucky.
When he wanted to realize that the second passenger on the motorcycle was opening fire on him, Gómez Leyva ducked. “I raised my head. I looked back at almost 45 degrees at the shooters and ducked again. It was a reflex action, a primal survival instinct.”
Moments later, the motorcycle had been lost down the street, and he had survived the gunfire without a scratch. He stopped the car. He pulled out his phone to call for help, but his hands were shaking. “It was chaos, but I touched myself and realized I wasn’t hurt. There was no blood.” He did not go home. He remembered that Manlio Fabio Beltrones, a PRI politician and old friend, lived nearby in a gated community with private security. That’s where he headed. “When I entered the gated community, I knew I was safe”. Not three minutes had passed since the attack.
Four hours of chaos
Beltrones received him at home. Together they called Omar García Harfuch, the capital’s police chief, himself a survivor of an attack. At 11:33 pm, Gómez Leyva spoke to his press officer and asked him to post a tweet: “At 11:10 pm, 200 meters from my house, two people on a motorcycle shot at me, apparently with the clear intention of killing me. I was saved by the armor of the vehicle I was driving and reported the matter to the authorities. CGL.” To this day, it is still unforgivable that it was misspelled. Excellence cannot be lost even the night a guy mows you down from a motorcycle.
The message was like gasoline. It went viral in minutes, setting fire to social networks, newspaper newsrooms, and public conversation. Meanwhile, police officers, relatives of the journalist, the press, and representatives of all the city’s Prosecutor’s Offices began to arrive at Beltrones’ house, fighting among themselves over whose jurisdiction the crime fell under. Those were chaotic moments in which Gómez Leyva functioned by a kind of inertia. He compares it to the management of a news item that arrives at the newsroom at the last minute:
-Newsrooms are like hospital emergency rooms or a soccer team, like a military platoon. You have to make quick decisions, often contradictory and difficult, with little information. I was aware of what was going on. And at the same time, you know, I saw the phone, and I saw the hashtags, the repercussions that this had caused. I didn’t know why it was against me; I didn’t quite know what was coming. I thought: ‘If this comes from the world of politics, which I don’t believe, then it will be impossible to prove’.
Gómez Leyva does not want to talk much about those hours: he says he is keeping the exclusive because he is writing a book, or a screenplay, which he hopes to have finished by 2025. At four in the morning, finally, he retired to his residence. “I left, as I do every night, from work, with a box of cookies the staff gave me because it was the end of the year exchanges. And I arrived home with an Army.” At seven o’clock, despite his friends’ recommendations to take a day off, he was at the radio station as he was every morning.
-Three people who understand what public life is and what communication is told me: ‘Go home and rest. You’ll be very upset; you don’t know what your downturn will be like. And I told them: ‘Impossible. I have a very good story to tell, and I have it very well documented, better than anyone else, in the first person. And why will I give in to the malice and spite of those who were already inventing things? If there is one program in my life that I cannot miss, it is the one in three hours. For me, it was a very simple decision; it was a journalist’s decision.
Life goes on
What was going through your mind during all that time?
-I am a journalist who, for 35 years, has worked on the difficult issues of public life in Mexico. I was a street reporter in difficult situations for many years. When I was director of Milenio Televisión, we had to report day by day on the war against crime. Reporters have been killed, reporters have been kidnapped, and we have received threats, extortion, and beatings. But no one had ever shot me in the head. What is really new is that they had tried to kill me. In such a violent and dangerous country where it is so easy to kill, someone decided to kill me. What was going through my head? In the hours and days that followed, I felt an enormous sadness. I was not angry. I wasn’t scared either, but a feeling of great sadness lasted for a long time. An empathy with all the people killed in their villages and the hit men, arrogant, move through the communities and continue to threaten them the next day. But I also realized, from the very first moment, that I had been privileged to live through such an episode and come out not only alive but unharmed. The next day also came something unexpected: a demonstration of affection, solidarity, and support, practically unanimous.
-And what have these six months been like?
-I am 65 years old. I told my loved ones: ‘It will be difficult for me to live in a situation that will surpass this in my life. And I will hardly live in a situation as fortuitous as this again. Somehow, my life ended that night. And it ended well: healthy, working, active. From that moment on, I want to give myself and my life a good epilogue, the time between the attack and decrepitude. After the [2024 presidential] elections, I expect a complete transformation of my professional life.
There are things, however, that have changed. Gómez Leyva is learning to live with an escort that follows him everywhere, to warn of his every move, not to be able to go to the usual places. “You lose practically all intimacy, or at least intimacy as you had lived it.” It helps that his two children are now grown up, and he lives alone. Psychological after-effects are also present. Like post-traumatic stress, which he had to treat with a therapist. Although he refuses to see himself as a victim. “If you have seen family members, children, mothers, or partners of your colleagues kidnapped or killed, are you going to live in a professional, existential victimization? Life goes on, and we are in a privileged position in a brutal country.
The journalist and the president
A day before the attack, the President of the Republic, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said that listening to journalists Sergio Sarmiento, Carlos Loret de Mola, and Ciro Gómez Leyva is “harmful to health” and can cause “a tumor in the brain”. It was not the first time -nor was it the last- that the president disqualified Gómez Leyva in the mañanera, the daily press conference where the leader sets the political agenda and attacks his adversaries. “That was a lousy coincidence for him, and he was the first to pay. The hashtag #AmloAsesino was in first place for a long time,” concedes the journalist.
Gómez Leyva has avoided confrontation with the president. In the hours following the attack, his phone did not stop ringing. “You don’t know how many people were writing me and pushing me to accuse López Obrador. It is very profitable and very seductive to say that the powers that be want to kill you, but I do not have any data today to say to prove it. I do have hundreds of data to say that this power has tried to intimidate me, has tried to undermine me, has tried to discredit me. But I cannot hold them responsible [for the assassination attempt]. Nor do I exonerate them of any guilt. I simply cannot prove it,” he explains.
*This was published in Spanish today by El País Newspaper on elpais.com
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