INDIANAPOLIS: Reporting in Mexico's border region is as dangerous as working in a war zone, Mexican journalists told a meeting of the Inter American Press Association here Sunday. Journalists attempting to cover the region's organised crime and smuggling of drugs and illegal immigrants risk being murdered and operate in a climate of fear, delegates attending the media forum, known by its Spanish initials SIP. Since 1995, at least 10 journalists have been assassinated in Mexico, most recently radio reporter Dolores Guadalupe Garcia Escamilla who was killed on April 16 in the border town of Nuevo Laredo, apparently for her coverage of organised crime.
An upsurge in violence between rival gangs in Nuevo Laredo, in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, earlier this year forced the US consulate to close temporarily. The Mexican border town, situated opposite Laredo, Texas, is home to narcotics gangs whom law enforcement officials say are behind the deaths of more than 100 people in the city this year, including a city police chief.
Gang members have also been blamed for the April disappearance of another journalist in the same area, Alfredo Jimenez, who worked for the Mexican newspaper El Imparcial de Sonora. The newspaper's managing editor, Juan Fernando Healy, told delegates here Sunday that Jimenez' disappearance "has created a difficult and fearful situation at the newspaper." He said the paper has had to take protective measures in a bid to protect its reporters' identities. "Our high-risk stories do not carry a reporter's by-line, and when we decide to cover these stories we assign two reporters to the story," he said, explaining some of the precautions the paper is taking to cover stories in the volatile border region.
In a separate presentation, which is likely to form the basis of resolutions planned for the assembly's final day Tuesday, the president of Mexico's El Universal newspaper, Juan Francisco Ealy Ortiz, said, "Threats and pressures against editors and reporters is such that some media organisations have stopped publishing stories on drug trafficking. "A powerful enemy is beating us at this game. The enemy is the silence, the silence of good citizens, the silence of the community and the silence of journalists," he said. Hector Davalos, another Mexican reporter attending the SIP assembly here who works for the Mexican newspaper Novedades, said the problem is "not only drug trafficking, it's the trafficking of immigrants, weapons, children for adoption it's not only drug trafficking." Jose Santiago Healy, the managing editor of the Diario Latino newspaper in San Diego, California, said it has become extremely risky for journalists seeking to cover the region.
"It's the worst it's been in decades, particularly in the north (of Mexico)," he said. "In 23 years in my profession on the border, I have seen nothing like it," he lamented. Amid a debate on how to improve safety for journalists, the managing editor of El Universal, Roberto Rock, said that crimes against journalists should be investigated by Mexico's federal authorities and not local officials. "Several local authorities have obstructed investigations" in the cases of reporters who were assassinated or threatened, he told delegates. He also explained that reporters could find themselves unwittingly in the middle of drug gang turf wars, particularly if a reporter is given information by rival gang members. Rock called for urgent legal reforms to give journalists covering the border region better protection to enable them to do their reporting without fear of retribution. |