Thread: Americans Covering Mexico Drug Trade Face Assassination Thre

Americans Covering Mexico Drug Trade Face Assassination Threat


By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 14, 2007; Page A18

MEXICO CITY, July 13 -- The San Antonio Express-News, a 230,000-circulation daily, this week withdrew its U.S.-Mexico border reporter after learning of what appears to be an unprecedented plan to assassinate American journalists who frequently write about drug cartels in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

Sources have told several Texas newspapers that hit men from Los Zetas, a group of former Mexican military officers who operate as the Gulf cartel's assassins, may have been hired to cross into the United States and execute American reporters. Word of the threat shattered the widely held perception here that foreign journalists are somehow shielded from violent retribution in a nation that is now second only to Iraq in deaths of journalists.

"We are not immune," wrote Eloy Aguilar and Dolly Mascareñas in a statement sent Friday to fellow members of the Foreign Correspondents Association in Mexico. "We have a very confused and violent situation in Mexico, with the government fighting drug cartels on one side and suspected guerrilla groups on the other. . . . An incident involving a U.S. or other foreign journalist could be used by all groups to create more confusion."

More than 30 journalists have been killed in Mexico in the past six years, but only one -- freelancer and activist Brad Will, who was shot to death during teacher protests last year in Oaxaca -- was American. Most of the killings are believed to be related to coverage of an ongoing war between drug cartels. Last year, drug gangs were suspected of firing automatic weapons and throwing a grenade into the newsroom of Nuevo Laredo's El Mañana newspaper, seriously injuring one reporter.

Express-News Editor Robert Rivard, a former Central America bureau chief for Newsweek magazine, said in an interview Friday that steps have been taken to conceal the location of his former border correspondent, Mariano Castillo.

Castillo wrote nearly 100 stories about cartels, crisscrossing the border from the newspaper's bureau in Laredo, Tex., for the past 4 1/2 years as drug violence escalated. His first piece about cartels, in late 2003, was headlined "Mexico town erupts into a battle zone; Grenades, machine guns roar south of the border." In his last front-page article, which ran in May, Castillo exposed the existence of a "shadowy and violent group that calls itself the 'Gente Nueva,' or New People -- and authorities don't want to talk about it."

For now the paper's border bureau, which is a 2 1/2-hour drive from San Antonio, sits vacant. Rivard is grappling with a challenge faced every day by his counterparts south of border -- how to cover a region where his reporters are targets.

"It's a dilemma," Rivard said. "On the one side, no story is worth a reporter's life; on the other side, you don't want to back down from telling readers about an important story."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01774.html

Warnings issued for U.S. reporters working along Mexican border

New York, July 13, 2007—A San Antonio Express-News reporter has been temporarily reassigned from his posting in the border city of Laredo after a U.S. law enforcement source warned that an unspecified American journalist is on the hit list of a Mexican criminal group, the newspaper's editor said today. The Association of Foreign Correspondents in Mexico also issued a warning today to journalists working on the U.S.-Mexican border to use extreme caution in their work.

Express-News Editor Robert Rivard told CPJ that Mariano Castillo, the daily's correspondent in Laredo, has left the border city as a precaution. Rivard said the paper received information that the Zetas criminal group has placed a U.S. journalist on a hit list. Rivard said the source's information was not an official warning; the information did not include the name of the U.S. journalist.

"We don't know if the report is credible, but we want to be cautious and we will keep Castillo out of the border region until we find out more," Rivard said. The Zetas are aligned with the Gulf drug-trafficking cartel. The group was born in the late 1990s when the Gulf cartel began recruiting Mexican Army deserters.

Also today, the Association of Foreign Correspondents issued a warning to reporters traveling to the Mexican city of Nuevo Laredo to be "extremely cautious and security conscious," especially if they are working on drug trafficking stories. "We have information from reliable sources that any U.S. or other foreign journalist in the area could become a target for assassination by killers hired by the local drug cartel," an association statement said.

Bob Mong, the editor of The Dallas Morning News, said he is taking the threat seriously. He said The Morning News does not disclose reporters' assignment plans but would not alter its coverage of the border region. "We will continue to report on important issues in this region. Our readers expect that and want and need that kind of information. This kind of barbarism simply can't affect a free press," Mong said.

The reports drew reaction today from the U.S. embassy in Mexico City. "Threats against journalists, in an attempt to intimidate them from reporting the truth, must be condemned by all of us who understand the important role of a free press in a democratic society," said Antonio Garza, U.S. ambassador to Mexico, in a statement today. "We will work with authorities in the U.S. and Mexico to do everything possible to ensure the safety of American reporters working along both sides of our common border."

Mexican journalists working on the border routinely face threats and violent attacks, leading to pervasive self-censorship. In a recent meeting with the Mexican ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, CPJ urged the federal government to take immediate steps to guarantee the safety of the press.


http://www.cpj.org/news/2007/americas/m ... y07na.html