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 Travel Writers' Resources | May 2007 
Mexico 2nd Only to Iraq in Journalist Slayings
 Marion Lloyd - Houston Chronicle
| Recent Attacks on Journalists
• Feb. 6, 2006: Gunmen storm the offices of El Mañana in Nuevo Laredo, wounding reporter Jaime Orozco. The paper stops detailed reporting of the drug war.
• Aug. 9, 2006: The body of Enrique Perea Quintanilla, the founding editor of a monthly investigative journal is found near Chihuahua City. Police blame organized crime.
• Nov. 21, 2006: Roberto Marcos Garcia, deputy editor of the weekly Testimonio in Veracruz state, is shot dead on the street after receiving death threats.
• Jan. 20, 2007: Rodolfo Rincon Taracena, an investigative journalist in southern Tabasco state, disappears the day he publishes a story on local trafficking.
• April 24, 2007: Saul Martinez Ortega, a reporter for Interdiario de Agua Prieta, is kidnapped and killed while investigating the murder of a policeman.
Sources: Reporters without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and news reports |
Acapulco — Five evenings a week, Amado Ramirez fielded complaints from his radio listeners on everything from corrupt public officials to the booming drug trade in this famous resort city.
Then, on a Friday night, just blocks from a beach-side strip of bars where thousands of tourists were partying, a gunman ambushed Ramirez in his car as he attempted to leave his Radiorama office. Bleeding profusely from bullet wounds in the chest, side and thigh, Ramirez dragged himself several yards to a hotel to plead for help, according to police and witness reports. Minutes later, he collapsed dead.
The murder April 6 came as a shock even in this city inured to drug-related violence. Ramirez, 50, who also worked as a correspondent for the Televisa TV network, was the most prominent of the more than two dozen reporters and editors slain nationwide since 2000. To his frightened colleagues, his murder confirmed a chilling fact: Mexico, in the grips of an escalating drug war, has become the world's second-deadliest country for journalists after Iraq.
"Of course we're scared," said Ricardo Castillo, news director for Acapulco's leading daily, El Sur. "He was the most visible of all of us, and his murder was meant to send a message."
The killing was intended as a show of force by traffickers waging a turf war for control of both the local market and the lucrative smuggling routes to the United States, said Castillo.
"More than an effort to silence the media, it's part of a strategy to instill terror," he said. "The assassination of a journalist isn't just any killing. It touches the basic fibers of society."
The danger appears to be rising.
Statistics vary among watchdog groups, but they agree that Mexico has surpassed Colombia, a country plagued by decades of guerrilla and drug violence, in the number of journalists killed each year.
Seven Mexican journalists were slain last year, according to a count by the Miami-based Inter American Press Association. The Paris-based Reporters without Borders tallied nine killings, and the Federation of Mexican Journalist Associations reported 11.
Three journalists were killed in Colombia last year, according to Reporters without Borders. The group counted 65 journalists and media assistants slain in Iraq over the past year.
A bloody warning
Many Mexican reporters, particularly in the embattled border states, have stopped writing about organized crime, and, as the drug war spreads south, journalists across the country are becoming targets.
On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, the decapitated body of a local drug dealer turned up outside a newspaper in the eastern port city of Veracruz.
According to local press reports, the killers left this warning: "For Milo, you'll all pay. You know it, and more heads of damned reporters are going to roll." The threat was presumed to be directed at Milo Vera, a local columnist.
"There's total impunity," said Jose Antonio Calcanio, president of the Federation of Mexican Journalists Associations, which represents 137 journalist groups nationwide.
"The government has no interest in resolving any of these cases," Calcanio said. "It's only when there's a prominent case like Amado Ramirez that they pretend to act, but then they forget, and nothing happens."
Two suspects were arrested in the days after the radio host's murder, but both were released on bail.
Many of Ramirez's colleagues suspect the men were scapegoats.
In February 2006, amid pressure from international watchdog groups, then-President Vicente Fox created a special prosecutor's office to focus on crimes against journalists. The results have been slim, critics say, in part because the office doesn't have jurisdiction over organized crime cases. Those fall under the jurisdiction of another office, the deputy attorney general's office for organized crime.
"They haven't been given the necessary teeth to do their job," said Carlos Lauria, Americas director for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, who was active in pressuring for the creation of the special prosecutor's office. Still, he blamed the country's corrupt and inefficient judicial system for the lack of progress in most of the cases.
The special prosecutor, Octavio Orellana, was not available for comment. But he has defended his office in the past, saying its main job is to prevent violence against journalists by investigating threats before they become reality.
Nearly 1,000 people have died in gangland-style killings related to drug-trafficking in the first four months of the year, compared with 2,000 in all of last year, according to Mexico City's El Universal newspaper. The southwestern state of Guerrero, home to Acapulco, has been one of the hardest hit, with some 300 gangland homicides last year.
The city made headlines worldwide after several heads were dumped outside government offices last summer and another washed up on a beach.
Then came a series of armed raids on local police stations, including one in which seven state officials died in February. After Ramirez's murder, the U.S. State Department updated its travel advisory for Mexico, for the first time warning of drug-gang violence in Acapulco.
Local authorities have tried to downplay Ramirez's murder. They say Ramirez, married with two daughters, was probably killed in connection with a lover's quarrel — a theory that infuriates his colleagues.
They note that Ramirez, who reportedly received death threats a month before he was killed, was not the only local journalist at risk. The night of his murder, a security guard at his radio station reported receiving a call with the threatening message: "We haven't finished. We're going for one. Misa is next."
'Passion' may have limits
Misa is believed to be Misael Habana, Ramirez's outspoken co-host of the nightly radio show.
Both men frequently criticized the government for failing to clean up the local police force, which is suspected of links with traffickers.
A few days after Ramirez was killed, a previously unknown group calling itself the Revolutionary Insurgency Brigades took responsibility for the murder and said in an e-mail that another 25 journalists were "in the sights" of organized crime.
"Before, when we went out on a story, our editors told us, 'Good luck.' Now they say, 'Be careful,' " said Eduardo Laredo, an Acapulco radio reporter who took part in a May 3 march here to demand that Ramirez's killers be brought to justice.
"Journalism is a passion," he said. "But there will come a time when we'll have to choose between our passion and our lives."
marionlloyd@gmail.com
In Meeting with Mexican Ambassador, CPJ Urges Action on Press Attacks
CPJ.com
Mexico’s federal government must take concrete steps to protect press freedom and prosecute those responsible for crimes against the press, a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a meeting Tuesday with the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan Casamitjana.
Expressing concern about the wave of deadly attacks against the media, the CPJ delegation called on the Mexican government to strengthen the office of the special prosecutor for press crimes and to make protection of free expression a federal responsibility.
As the war between powerful drug cartels has intensified in the last three years, local journalists who report on organized crime and the drug trade in Mexico are facing grave risks. CPJ research shows that six journalists have been murdered in direct reprisal for their work since 2000. CPJ is still investigating the circumstances surrounding the slayings of 12 other journalists since then to determine if their deaths are work-related. Three journalists have also disappeared since 2005. Two of them were covering crime stories.
Though the battle between the cartels is particularly severe in northern states, violence has spread to almost every Mexican state in the last year.
Violence and fear have had a devastating effect on the press, as reporters who cover crime and drug trafficking have increasingly resorted to self-censorship. The wave of violence against the press is inhibiting journalists’ ability to report the news. Human rights abuses, drug trafficking, crime, corruption, and other issues that affect the daily lives of ordinary people are not being covered.
After a deadly attack against the daily El Mañana in the border city of Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican government recognized violence against the press as a national problem by creating a special prosecutor's office to investigate crimes against the press in February 2006. Unfortunately, Mexico’s justice system has failed to bring an end to this cycle of violence and appears far from solving any of the recent murders.
In response, Sarukhan told the CPJ delegation: “We need to ensure that the office of the special prosecutor has teeth so it can entirely fulfill the mandate for which it was created.”
The delegation also expressed concern about the stalled investigation into the murder of U.S. journalist Brad Will, who was shot in October 2006 while covering clashes between protesters and local officials in Oaxaca. The CPJ delegation included board member Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune, CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon, and Senior Program Coordinator Carlos Lauría.
On April 9, CPJ sent a letter to President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa urging the federal government to put an end to the tide of deadly violence after the execution-style killing of veteran journalist Amado Ramírez Dillanes in Acapulco. CPJ called on Calderón to make protection of press freedom a hallmark of his administration by supporting legislation making it a crime to conspire against, through violence or other means, the right to free expression.
Sarukhan expressed a commitment to facilitate meetings with high-ranking government officials in Mexico City to further discuss press freedom conditions. “We look forward to continuing our discussions, and to working together with the Mexican government to put an end to the tide of violence against the press,” CPJ’s Simon said. |
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