Working with a gun to the head in Mexico

By James C. McKinley Jr. The New York Times

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2006

NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico René Martínez had just sat down to edit a batch of articles at 7:50 Monday evening when he heard the heavy tread of military boots just outside the newsroom and then, suddenly, like a scream on a quiet night, blasts of machine-gun fire.

 

The newsroom of El Mañana descended into panic. Reporters dived to the floor and crawled under desks. Bullets from high-powered weapons tore through glass and walls. One of the two heavily armed gunmen screamed a threat. Then a grenade went off and the air filled with dust and smoke, Martínez recalled.

 

As the two gunmen fled, Martínez crawled toward the newsroom door. There he saw the night rewrite reporter, Jaime Orozco Tey, lying in blood. He had been hit at least three times and was critically wounded.

 

"The guy who shot him never saw him," Martínez said. "This is a dark place to work. We know there is danger in the streets, but we continue to work."

 

On Wednesday, President Vicente Fox appointed a special federal prosecutor to investigate crimes against journalists, and investigators began to look for clues in the shooting in this border city, across the Rio Grande from Texas.

 

But the brazen attack on El Mañana, the biggest newspaper here, underscored an ugly truth. Mexico has become one of the most dangerous places to practice journalism, outside of Iraq. Drug dealers and corrupt police officers regularly kill those who write about them, leading most reporters to censor themselves, journalists say.

 

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based organization, says that at least four Mexican journalists have been killed in the past six years in direct reprisals for their reporting on drug dealers, and that one young investigative reporter, Alfredo Jiménez Mota, from Hermosillo, in northwest Mexico, is missing and presumed dead after writing about a drug gang called Los Numeros.

 

"That's a very alarming number," said Joel Simon, the committee's deputy director. "The situation is very comparable to Colombia in terms of self-censorship and the level of violence."

 

Another five reporters have been killed for motives that remain unclear but may have had to do with their work, the committee says.

 

At least two others have been critically wounded, most recently Orozco, who did not report on drug dealing but seems to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

Daniel Rosas, managing editor of El Mañana, said the newspaper had purposely stopped reporting on drug cartels since its editorial director, Roberto Mora García, an outspoken critic of police corruption, was knifed to death in March 2004 as he arrived home after work. Rosas said the newspaper had not received any warning before the most recent attack.

 

"It could be that they want to make us an example to control all the press," he said. "It's the same as terrorism. It is terrorism."

 

The attorney general, Daniel Cabeza de Vaca, said Thursday that drug dealers were behind the attack. A prime suspect has been located, he said, but no one has been arrested.

 

Not far from the offices of El Mañana, Guadalupe García, a crime reporter for the radio station Estereo 91, was shot to death in April 2005 after signing off from her morning news program. She was known for her provocative reports that named drug runners and their bosses. Someone had even broadcast a threat to kill her over the police radio frequency, which she monitored.

 

One editor at El Mañana who narrowly survived the attack this week - several bullets smashed into the wall near him - summed up the position of reporters here succinctly: "It's like working with a pistol to your head." He insisted on not being named.

 

Jesús Blancornelas, editor of Zeta, a magazine in Tijuana, Mexico, said in an interview that the attacks against journalists continued because they were seldom if ever solved by the state police, who he says are often corrupted by drug dealers.

 

"The government does not investigate because the government is complicit," he said.

 

Nor have the federal authorities made much progress in most of the cases they have taken on, like that of Jiménez Mota, he noted. A colleague of Blancornelas's, Francisco Ortíz Franco, was killed on June 22, 2004, by assassins linked to a drug cartel. Three people thought to have had lesser roles in that killing have been detained, but two leaders in the Arellano Félix drug cartel believed to have ordered the killing remain at large, law enforcement officials have said.

 

Ortíz was the third Zeta journalist to be killed in nine years. Blancornelas himself was shot and critically wounded by gunmen who ambushed his car in November 1997. No one was ever arrested for that attack, in which his driver died.