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Journalists Under Fire in Mexico Border Drug War
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=reutersEdge&st...
Wed Feb 9, 2005 11:53 AM ET
By Tim Gaynor
MATAMOROS, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican journalist Francisco Arratia used to tap out daily columns sounding off against the drug traffickers and corrupt
cops that blighted his home city on the U.S. border.
When the cartel enforcers came for him, they spread his palms out wide and shattered his fingers with a hammer-like blow. Then they poured acid into
the wounds and pummeled him until his heart stopped beating.
The newspaper columnist from Matamoros, south of Brownsville, Texas, was one of three Mexican journalists murdered along the U.S.-Mexico border last
year amid a surge in drug-related violence.
Media groups warn that the sun-scorched region where rival cartels battle for control of the lucrative trade in cocaine, marijuana and amphetamines
has become the most hazardous place in the hemisphere for reporters.
The attacks are so intimidating that even crusading editor Jesus Blancornelas, regarded as the dean of border reporters, says he regrets ever having
started his Tijuana-based investigative magazine Zeta.
Arratia's death on Aug. 31 followed the shooting of another magazine editor in Tijuana in June and the fatal stabbing of a newspaper editor in Nuevo
Laredo, south of Laredo, Texas, in disputed circumstances in March.
It was always a dangerous region and it is getting steadily worse. In recent months, drug-gang hit men have executed scores of people and more than
100 U.S. and Mexican citizens have been kidnapped on the border, prompting the Mexican government to wage an all-out battle against drug gangs.
As the violence escalates, journalists increasingly find themselves in the firing line.
"If you carry out investigative reporting on the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly into drug trafficking, then you face death," said Carlos Lauria of
the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.
"Journalists, editors and columnists are getting killed, and it's become one of the most dangerous places in the Americas to work."
POWER OF THE CARTELS
According to media watchdog Reporters Without Borders, more journalists were killed in Mexico than anywhere else in the Americas last year. Worldwide,
only Iraq, Bangladesh and the Philippines had more.
Campaigning editor Blancornelas has lost two colleagues and a bodyguard in gun attacks since his award-winning magazine was founded in 1980.
Living with armed guards around the clock since he barely survived a machine gun attack by Tijuana cartel hit men in 1997, he says the cost in human
life has been too high.
"We continue to carry out investigations to clear up the murders of our colleagues. But if it wasn't for that, I would be in my house resting." he
said by telephone. "I regret founding Zeta."
The co-editor of Zeta, Francisco Ortiz, was gunned down in front of his two young children in Tijuana on June 22, weeks after completing two stories
exploring links between the drug trade and Mexican authorities.
One identified a local drug cartel gunman alleged to have killed a former assistant state attorney general in the city, the other story pointed a
finger at a group of cartel affiliates issued with fake police identity cards by corrupt local prosecutors.
At the other end of the border, Arratia used his widely syndicated "spokesman" column to chide corrupt officials and local drug trade affiliates,
opting to spell out their names in capital letters.
He was a widely respected teacher known as "El Profe" or "The Professor," but that didn't save him from the thugs.
A man with ties to the notorious Gulf cartel arrested on an unrelated firearms charge later confessed to his murder. He told prosecutors the beating
was ordered to bully Arratia into giving up his column and not to kill him.
SCARED INTO SILENCE
The murders -- together with that of the editor of El Manana de Nuevo Laredo newspaper, Roberto Mora, who was stabbed more than 20 times on March 19
in an alleged crime of passion -- create a climate of fear in the region, journalists say.
"It's like living in a war zone," Arturo Solis, a Reynosa-based human rights activist and online newspaper editor, told Reuters. "The difference is
that in a war you can write about what you see, but here you can't do that. You have to keep it to yourself."
The three murders triggered demonstrations in cities across Mexico and led to calls on the government to make the murder of a journalist a special
crime to be investigated by federal authorities.
But months later there have been no convictions in any of the cases, and analysts say increasingly jittery reporters are backing away from
investigative journalism on the border.
"You can ask people who the drug traffickers are and they can point them out to you and give you their names, but no one will publish them," says
Leonarda Reyes of Mexico's Center for Journalism and Public Ethics.
"After the attacks, reporters are intimidated," she said.
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Dave
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IMO, every illegal drug user in the U.S. bears EQUAL responsibility for Arratia's torture and murder. That none will be punished all but guarantees
that this will happen again.
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Dave
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| Quote: | Originally posted by grover
There are a Lot of legal stoners out there, and that's ok, as long as the profits go in approved pockets.
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Lots of Seagrams is sold in the U.S. but I haven't read of any Canadian journalists tortured and murdered.
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