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 Editorials | Issues | June 2007 
In Mexico, Drug Traffickers Silence Media
 Chris Hawley & Sean Holstege - The Arizona Republic
When hand grenades began exploding outside its subsidiary in Sonora state, the largest newspaper chain in Mexico decided to throw in the towel.
"For the good of all, I recognize the imperative need to make this painful and difficult decision and announce the temporary closure of the Cambio Sonora newspaper," Mario Vázquez Raña, president of Organización Editorial Mexicana, told readers in a letter.
That was two weeks ago. The newspaper has not published since.
Across Mexico, a tide of drug-related violence is silencing journalists, one of the few institutions that people still trust in this country racked by police and judicial corruption.
Mexico was the deadliest country for journalists after Iraq in 2006, with nine dead and three missing, according to the Reporters Without Borders watchdog group.
The numbers of attacks have been rising since 2003, as reporters are snatched from the street by armed men in SUVs or gunned down as they leave their offices. Just in the past month, a reporter and cameraman disappeared, another reporter received death threats and a newspaper office was attacked.
The repression is hampering anti-crime efforts and threatening to destroy Mexico's free press, which had just begun to flourish after decades of control by the Mexican government, some journalists say.
"Before, the repression was political. Now, it's coming from organized crime, and it's targeting the very lives of journalists," said Adela Navarro Bello, publisher of the Zeta newsmagazine in Tijuana.
In some cases, attackers seem to be punishing reporters for specific articles identifying drug-smuggling and other suspects. But other attacks, like the Cambio Sonora grenades, seem to be aimed simply at sowing fear among the news media, said Reporters Without Borders, which interviewed reporters for its annual report.
"Journalists on the border were telling us they were afraid to write about local crimes," said Lucie Morillon, Washington director for the group. "If you know the mayor or a powerful politician is linked to drug traffickers and you've just had a baby, you won't write that story."
Newsroom fear
In drug hotspots, many newspapers no longer write about drug-related crime. Others bury news of shootouts and murders deep in the newspaper.
Nuevo Laredo's El Mañana newspaper stopped covering drug-related crimes after a Feb. 6, 2006, attack on its offices with grenades and assault rifles. Editors now review every crime story to see if it is safe to print, editor Ricardo Garza said.
At Cambio Sonora, editors had stopped assigning drug-related investigative articles more than a year ago, editor Roberto Gutiérrez said.
El Imparcial, the most prestigious newspaper in Sonora, cut back on its drug-crime reporting after one of its reporters, Alfredo Jiménez, disappeared in 2005. Now, the newspaper won't even talk about the issue.
In the past year, there have been at least 30 attacks, threats or attempts to silence journalists or their employers, according to an analysis by The Republic. And the incidents are getting closer to the Arizona border.
On April 16, gunmen killed Saúl Martínez, a reporter for the Interdiario newspaper in Agua Prieta, just across the border from Douglas. Police said he may have been involved in drug smuggling, a charge his family fiercely denies.
Also in April, reporters in San Luis Río Colorado, near Yuma, filed a police complaint alleging that lawyers for an drug-trafficking suspect were pressuring them to change testimony about the 1997 death of a fellow journalist.
The attackers have been picking increasingly high-profile targets.
On April 6, gunmen killed Amado Ramírez, correspondent in Acapulco for Mexico's No. 1 television network, Televisa. On May 10, they abducted popular television reporter Gamaliel López Candanosa and his cameraman in Monterrey, Mexico's third-largest city.
Since 1994, 15 reporters have been confirmed killed because of their work, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The only conviction came 12 years ago, and only five cases resulted in arrests.
A main reason is that murder is not a federal offense under Mexican law and state investigators often lack the tools or desire to hunt down journalists' killers.
When journalist killings began to accelerate last year, the Mexican government created an Office of the Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Journalists to handle such cases. But of 152 complaints investigated by the office, only two have gone to court, special prosecutor Octavio Orellana told La Jornada newspaper on May 16.
"More than a year has passed with no results. They haven't broken that cycle of impunity," said Carlos Luria, Americas program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Setback for democracy
Press watchdog groups say the pressure comes at a critical time, as Mexican journalists were becoming more independent and aggressive after decades of government control.
Until democratic reforms in the 1990s, Mexican presidents pressured the media by controlling the flow of government advertising, manipulating unions allied with the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or cutting off newspapers' paper supply through the state-run newsprint monopoly, Productora y Importadora de Papel S.A.
Mexicans now trust the mass media more than they trust President Felipe Calderón, the Supreme Court, the police and nearly every other institution in Mexico, according to a February poll by the Mitofsky consulting company. Only universities, the Roman Catholic Church, the army and the National Commission on Human Rights ranked higher.
Watchdog groups say the attacks on journalists are crippling Calderón's recent efforts to crack down on drug crime in Tijuana, Nuevo Laredo, Monterrey, Michoacán state and other hotspots.
Police corruption in these places is rampant, and journalists are often the only source of solid information about drug lords.
"The drug traffickers are getting rid of people who tell the Mexican people the truth, who keep them informed." Morillon said.
"You can't solve the drug problem if you don't have the proper information."
Failing to address the drug problem will lead to more violence, she and others said.
"It will be a very unstable situation and very dangerous, "Morillon said. "It's terrible for Mexican civil society, and that will affect the border states."
Silencing a giant
The May 24 closure of Cambio Sonora showed that even Mexico's biggest newspaper chain could be brought to heel, analysts say.
"This goes beyond violence to the press," Lauria said. "It's limiting the ability of Mexicans to communicate with each other."
Organización Editorial Mexicana, known as OEM, claims to be Latin America's biggest newspaper chain, with 70 daily papers.
Gannett Co., which owns The Republic, has 102 daily newspapers.OEM also owns 24 radio stations, and Vázquez Raña, the company's president, briefly owned the U.S. news agency United Press International in the 1980s.
Grenade attacks
The company's decision to close Cambio Sonora came after grenades exploded in the newspaper's parking lot on April 17 and May 16.
The second grenade narrowly missed a reporter who was coming out of the office. That attack came the same day as a confrontation between police and drug smugglers that killed 23 people in northeastern Sonora.
OEM said it closed the newspaper because the Sonoran authorities ignored the company's calls to put police around its office and failed to find the perpetrators.
The company said that it did not believe the move showed weakness and hoped that the closure would force the Sonoran government to take action.
"The very fact that we are such a large and strong chain should prevent people from seeing this as a sign of weakness," company Vice President Eduardo Andrade said.
"What we are hoping is that this will make everyone reflect on the responsibility of the authorities to provide security."
Sonoran Gov. Eduardo Bours said detectives are doing their best to find the attackers and accused the company of overreacting.
"The two grenades are regrettable, no doubt about it, and I'm not saying they aren't regrettable," Bours told reporters at a May 28 news conference. "But the reaction seems extremely strange to me, to say the least."
Newspaper officials still don't know the motive for the attacks. Cambio Sonora had not published any investigative articles recently, said Gutiérrez, the newspaper's editor.
"We don't have the slightest idea what the attacks were about," he told The Republic shortly before the paper closed.
The newspaper had already taken precautions to protect its reporters after the disappearance of El Imparcial's Jiménez, he said.
Crime stories ran without bylines, and the newspaper had struck a deal not to run investigative pieces unless all newspapers in the region published them simultaneously.
Andrade said the newspaper's reporters will continue to be paid during the paper's closure.
"It's worrying how they have managed to intimidate these media," said Navarro, the publisher of Zeta.
"It's getting more serious and more widespread."
"We've lost media in the northwest of the country and some in the center and others. We're just going to keep doing our job and hope these gloomy statistics end."
Republic reporter Sergio Solache contributed to this article. |
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