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  1. #1
    Senior Member Brian503a's Avatar
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    Fox's Term Most Dangerous Ever For Journalists

    http://www.editorandpublisher.com

    Mexican Congress: Fox's Term Most Dangerous Ever For Journalists

    By Mark Fitzgerald

    Published: September 11, 2006 3:25 PM ET

    CHICAGO As Mexico's electoral tribunal was confirming Felipe Calderón as the nation's next president last week, a Mexican congressional task force confirmed that the six-year term of the current president was the most dangerous period on record for journalists.

    During the "sexenio" of President Vicente Fox, 23 journalists have been assassinated because of their work, and another three have disappeared, according to the Working Group on Aggression Against Journalists and the Communications Media of the Chamber of Deputies.

    Virtually all the murders remain unsolved, the working group said.

    Journalism has become “the riskiest of professions right now,” the report says.

    “In different states of the nation, in recent year, the (incidents of) aggression against communicators and the media can be counted in the hundreds,” it adds.

    In some ways, Fox has been the strongest friend of the press of any recent president. He eliminated the overt and covert government bribery of journalists that compromised most of the nation’s bigger newspapers. He for the first time mobilized federal law enforcement forces to investigate crimes against journalists. And he signed into law the first freedom of information statute in the nation’s history.

    Fox created a special federal prosecutor for crimes against the press, which now has a caseload of 35 criminal incidents.

    But journalism has become undeniably a riskier occupation during his term as warring drug cartels, aided by corrupt police, have threatened, assaulted and, often, killed journalists whose investigations inconvenience their illicit trade.

    Journalists have been killed at an average of four every year during Fox’s term, the working group’s president, Beatriz Mojica, said at a press conference on the release of the report. The Mexico City daily El Universal, in an article by Silvia Otero, published an account of the report and remarks of Mojica, a legislator with the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), the party whose leader, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, was declared the loser of July’s extremely close race for president.

    Mojica urged creation of a national special commission to investigate attacks against journalists, and the impunity almost always follows a killing.

    Mojica said federal and state prosecutors need to go after local law enforcement and government authorities to break that impunity “because the biggest part of this aggression comes from these circles of power.”

    Crimes against journalists threaten Mexican society itself, Mojica said: “For in a democracy, in a country that is not at war, this elevated number of assaults, threats and assassinations against communicators, has paid off for political groups, for organized crime Mafias, and the target of attacks now include (civil) authorities.”

    In recent weeks, the attacks have included the invasion of the newsroom of a Oaxaca newspaper and a grenade exploded at two papers in the resort city of Cancun. Mojica said the legislative group was also alarmed at the legal attack on Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, who in a book exposed a child sex-trafficking ring of businessmen and public officials in the state of Puebla. A tape surfaced last spring allegedly recording the governor promising protection of the traffickers and vowing some undefined revenge on Cacho. She is charged with criminal defamation, which carries a possible jail sentence in Mexico.

    The message being sent to the press, the working group said, is: “Shut up or you die.”

    Mexico needs “specific plans” at all stages of government “that guarantee and safeguard the open and safe exercise of freedom of expression,” the group’s report added.


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Mark Fitzgerald (mfitzgerald@editorandpublisher.com) is E&P's editor-at-large
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  2. #2
    noyoucannot's Avatar
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    I wonder if our elite media in this country really understands what they are getting themselves into after supporting the open borders? I think they don't believe all of this illegal immigration will really affect them. They will have a rude awakening.

  3. #3
    Senior Member LegalUSCitizen's Avatar
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    Good point, Noyoucannot. And you never hear ours speak out about what has happened to them with outrage.
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