/ 8 September 2010

Mexican media cowed by drug violence

In January, gunmen kidnapped, tortured and shot dead Mexican reporter Valetin Valdes before dumping his body outside a motel.

In January, gunmen kidnapped, tortured and shot dead Mexican reporter Valetin Valdes before dumping his body outside a motel, an apparent reprisal for having identified a drug lord in his newspaper.

Valdes’ death is just one recent attack against the press in Mexico, where over 30 media workers have disappeared or been killed since President Felipe Calderon launched his war on drug cartels in late 2006, the US-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said in a new report released on Wednesday.

Mexico, Latin America’s second-largest economy, has become one of the world’s most dangerous places for reporters, the report said, and authorities are little better than peers in conflict-wracked Somalia and Afghanistan at solving crimes against the media.

Press advocates blame Mexican authorities for allowing a culture of impunity to take root and for failing to properly investigate attacks and bring criminals to trial.

“The widespread and unpunished attacks … are destroying citizens’ constitutionally and internationally protected right to free expression,” CPJ said.

Mounting attacks on the media is just one face of the rising drug violence that has claimed more than 28 000 lives since Calderon took office, undermining Mexico’s global image and threatening a plodding economic recovery.

Most of those killed have been police or drug hitmen, but violence has also take a toll on judges, prison workers and journalists. More than 90% of the murders go unsolved.

One such case involved crime reporter Bladimir Antuna, who was abducted, tortured and strangled with a belt in the northern city of Durango in November last year. His bullet-riddled body was later dumped on a street.

According to a prosecutor in Durango, authorities barely questioned the people who witnessed Antuna’s abduction, and Antuna’s wife was only briefly interviewed by police.

Four and a half months after his murder, no one else had been questioned and state investigators had done virtually no detective work, CPJ said. “Authorities failed to take even the simplest steps to solve the crime,” it concluded.

Not by force alone
Calderon has been praised by US President Barack Obama for bravely taking on the cartels, and many Mexicans still support his military crackdown, but after years of violence opposition politicians and drug trade experts say it is clear that force alone cannot bring peace back to Mexico.

Many are urging Calderon to press ahead with more meaningful reforms to the justice, police and prison systems.

Much of the Mexican media has begun to self-censor as cartels increasingly target reporters to sway coverage or get air time for gory videos aimed at intimidating rivals.

Reporters fear they risk their lives if they run investigative reports about corrupt politicians working with drug gangs or if they publish the names of cartel leaders living at large.

“They will kill you and then dismember you. And your family will always be waiting for you to come home,” a newspaper editor in the manufacturing city of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, told the CPJ.

The turf war that erupted early this year around Reynosa, between the Gulf and Zetas cartels, has gone virtually unreported by Reynosa media, making it harder for national and international journalists to report the violence.

When two car bombs exploded last month near the studio of a major TV station in nearby Tamaulipas state, the attacks went unreported by local news radio stations and dailies.

CPJ has held meetings with Calderon and urged him to make crimes against freedom of expression a federal offense. Such calls have been taken up by Congress but have stalled in the Senate, part of a wider gridlock in passing reform bills.

“The more Mexico allows the flow of information to be controlled by drug cartels and dishonest local officials, the more it erodes its status as a reliable global partner,” CPJ said.