Prosecutor says cartel killed editor
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/tijuana/20040819-1...
Tijuana journalist profiled gangsters
By Sandra Dibble and Anna Cearley
August 19, 2004
TIJUANA ? A top Mexican prosecutor yesterday linked the killing of journalist Francisco Ortz Franco to the Arellano Felix drug cartel, suggesting that
its members were retaliating for an article published under his byline in the weekly newspaper Zeta.
The article was based on the FBI's May announcement that U.S. agents had obtained 76 photos of suspected Arellano members whose pictures were taken
for fake police credentials. The FBI posted the photos on the Internet.
Ortz angered the cartel by providing additional details on who was behind the credential scheme, said Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, in charge of
prosecuting organized crime for Mexico's federal attorney general's office.
In the article, Ortiz identified many of the people in the photos by name and explained their connection to the cartel, in some cases listing them as
former or current police officers. The information was based on unidentified sources.
"What we can say about the case of Mr. Ortz Franco is that his work was not in vain," Santiago Vasconcelos said at a news conference held at the state
attorney general's office in Tijuana. "What we can say is that the explosion that he caused . . . has led to results."
Without offering details, Santiago Vasconcelos and Baja California Attorney General Antonio Martnez Luna said the capture of a half-dozen suspects in
recent days led to information that links the killing of Ortz to the cartel.
Ortz was shot inside his car June 22 while two of his children sat in the back seat. The newsweekly he worked for regularly breaks ground with its
investigations of the drug cartels that operate in Baja California, and Ortz was the third Zeta editor attacked in 16 years.
Zeta's top editor, Jesus Blancornelas, was also a target of the cartel, according to both U.S. and Mexican authorities, though he survived the
November 1997 attack and continues to write extensively about drug traffickers. Blancornelas' bodyguard, Luis Alberto Valero, however, was slain.
Santiago Vasconcelos said that the once-dominant Arellanos have grown increasingly weak with a series of key arrests, and that has caused killers
within the organization to resort to violence: "These people, when they are unmasked . . . attack directly."
Ortz's work "gave us an X-ray of how the organization was being restructured . . .. We had very strong intelligence and knew most of it, but some of
it we lacked, and that was what most affected them."
Investigators also connected the journalist's killers to other investigations, including:
The March killing of Angelica Aguilar Navarro, 27, who was Tijuana marketing director for the Mexican television network Television Azteca, and her
brother, Jorge Angel Aguilar, 25, the year before.
The October 2002 abduction of three state police agents. The bodies of two of them ? Jorge Raul Verdugo Cuara, 25, and Sergio Gabriel Bravo Alfaro, 36
? were found days later stuffed in the trunk of an abandoned car and covered with hundreds of $1 bills. A third officer, Carlos Lopez Avalos, 22,
remains missing and is presumed dead.
The July killing of Tijuana police officer Lus Amando Dorantes Gonzalez, targeted a week and a half after he helped federal agents detain several drug
trafficking suspects.
The killers remain at large, Santiago Vasconcelos said.
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