Violent killings and a silent casualty
By Leonarda Reyes Posted Thu, Oct 19 2006
Gsbriela Ramirez, widow of slain Tijuana journalist, Francisco Ortiz, is consoled by her children Daniel (left) Andrea and Francisco Jr. during Ortiz' funeral on June 24, 2004 in Tijuana, Mexico. Ortiz, an editor at the Tijuana weekly Zeta was assassinated in his parked car on Tuesday. (AP Photo/David Maung)
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On Feb.6, 2006, fifteen minutes before 7 p.m., two hit men walked into the newsroom of El Mañana newspaper in Nuevo Laredo on the Texas-Mexico border and started firing automatic weapons. Before they left, they threw a grenade that blew a hole in the building's wall. One reporter, Jaime Orozco Tey, was in serious condition after he was shot five times. The tragedy could have been worse, but luckily it was a holiday, and most of the newspaper staff was not on duty.
It was the worst attack on a Mexican media organization in recent history, and the second against the publication in two years. Roberto Mora, its editorial director, was killed in May 2004. It was only the latest in the ever- increasing series of attacks on journalists by drug cartels.
Just days after the El Mañana attacks, President Vicente Fox announced he would name a special prosecutor to investigate crimes against journalists.
On Feb. 22, he named David Vega Vera to the post. The prosecutor's office was created under a presidential order, which means incoming President, Felipe Calderon, could easily eliminate it if he chooses when he takes office in December.
The office will continue after the end of Fox's administration if Mexican journalists want it, Vega Vera says. Journalists must put pressure on the next government to keep the office, he says.
The office has already compiled 78 cases, beginning as early as 2000, that they want to prosecute. But compiling and prosecuting are two different tasks because the office does not have jurisdiction over cases linked to drug trafficking. Those cases would fall to the state prosecutor. The special prosecutor's office will only handle cases that break a federal law and have a link to the journalistic work of the victim.
Still, Vega Vera is optimistic. “What we have is already progress. Journalists wouldn't have anybody to talk to in the Federal Prosecutor's office otherwise. We started from scratch and now we documented 78 cases,” he says.
But since the creation of the office, the violence has escalated even further.
On July 8, 2006, Rafael Ortiz finished his work in the newsroom of Zócalo, a newspaper in Monclova, a major city in the state of Coahuila on the northeast border of Mexico. He had been reporting on prostitution mafias before walking out the newsroom at about 1:30 a.m.
Hours later his family became concerned when Rafael, 32, didn't show up for the radio news show that he also hosted. The state governor publicly disclosed there was evidence that the reporter had been kidnapped by organized crime. He still has not been found.
Enrique Perea, 50, was found dead on a dirt road in the northern border state of Chihuahua, on Aug. 9, 2006. He had been tortured and shot.
Perea had covered the crime beat for different news organizations for more than 20 years until 10 months before his death when he started to publish his own magazine, Two Faces, One Truth, which focused on investigating unsolved crimes.
Signs that drug cartels targeted journalists were sporadic in the past, but systematic attacks have become more vicious in the past three years. Reporters have disappeared and have even been killed in plain daylight and in front of witnesses.
Gregorio Rodriguez was a correspondent for the statewide newspaper El Debate, in Escuinapa, near the tourist town of Mazatlan, in the northwest state of Sinaloa.
As a father of two, Gregorio used to take photographs at weddings and parties to supplement his income. He allegedly took photographs in a party where the director of the municipal police and a local drug dealer were having a good time. The photographs he took have never been seen.
On Nov. 28, 2004, Gregorio was dinning outside at a restaurant with his two children when a hit man exited a pickup truck, shot him several times, then drove away.
The killings and attacks show a pattern of powerful drug mafias acting with chilling impunity. Organized crime has become the most dangerous threat to freedom of expression along with corrupt police forces that protect the mafia.
Drug dealing at home
Until the mid-'90s, a drug cartel leader known as “Lord of the Skies,” was infamous for transporting cocaine in airplanes from Colombia to Mexico's northern border then on to drug mafias in the United States.
Soon after the U.S. and Mexico implemented a strategy to intercept the illegal drug flights, the cartels began using large ships for transportation. The drugs are dropped off on the coast of Mexico, where they are picked up by speedboats and stored until they are transported north.
The entire Mexican territory is now a potential transit area, and for these operations to be successful the cartels need local protection and local accomplices. States on the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico coasts have become war grounds with a mounting toll of bloody executions as the combating cartels seek control of the area.
The growing brutality against journalists is partially because the drug dealers now understand the potential negative impact of bad publicity. Media accounts put pressure on local and federal authorities, and drug dealers have to hide or decrease their export business. Local drug dealers have families, wives, children, parents, friends and reputations to protect.
The Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET), which long denounced the attacks, coordinated protests that lead to the launch of a permanent campaign to curve violence against journalists in 2005. But it was the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York that approached President Fox with the proposal to create a special prosecution office to investigate attacks against journalists.
According to CEPET, during President Fox's administration, 17 journalists have been killed because of their work, including five in 2004 alone, ranking Mexico as the most dangerous country for journalists in the western hemisphere.
To put the numbers in perspective, the killings are not any greater than in previous administrations. Under President Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) at least 24 journalists were killed. During the term of his predecessor, Carlos Salinas (1988-1994), at least 46 journalists were murdered.
But the recent violence is more lethal than in the past and is having a disturbing impact on the media. Although international freedom of expression reports count the number of attacks and deaths, one casualty may be missing: Self imposed censorship.
For example, after the second attack, El Mañana stopped giving interviews.
“We feel an obligation to protect our reporters and personnel and we feel we exposed them when we talk,” said Ramon Deandar, one of the owners, in a press conference right after the last attack.
Other media organizations appear to have adopted the same strategy of self-censorship. Instead of the in-depth investigation of organized crime they once published, they now just print police press releases and press conferences of government authorities.
Those who have not chosen that route, such as the daily newspaper Por Esto!, face escalating violence. After publishing an investigative story about organized crime in late August, the paper's offices in Mérida and Cancun were attacked with grenades and one of its reporters was also attacked.
The special prosecutor's office seems to have done little to discourage the violence.
“We are disorganized, not well coordinated and we are confronting highly sophisticated criminals,” says federal prosecutor Daniel Cabeza de Vaca.
While authorities struggle to get organized, attacks against the media continue, and one by one, journalists are silenced.