During January 2011, Anabel Hernndez's extended family held a party at a favourite cafe in the north of Mexico City. As one of the country's leading journalists ... Hernndez had to leave early, as so often, to finish an article". After she left ... gunmen burst in. But this was no robbery it was "pure intimidation, aimed at my family, and at me." Hernndez's offence was to write a book about the drug cartels that have wrought carnage across Mexico, taking some 80,000 lives. Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers [is] about the mafia state; how the old Guadalajara cartel of the 1980s was protected by the Mexican government just as its heir, Guzmn's Sinaloa syndicate, is now. The threats began when Hernndez's book was published in Mexico in 2010. Veteran reporter Mike O'Connor works full-time on behalf of Mexico's menaced reporters, based in Mexico City for the Committee to Protect Journalists. "The silencing of the press and killing of journalists is integral to the reality, the big story, of what is happening here," explains O'Connor. "The cartels are taking territory. For the cartels to take territory, three things have to happen. One is to control the institutions with guns basically, the police. The second is to control political power. And, for the first two to be effective, you have to control the press." Hernndez is "very pleased my book is being published in English, so it can be read in London and New York. I want it published ... where HSBC took Chapo Guzmn's money."