Thread: Reporting on border exacts toll

Reporting on border exacts toll
Courageous journalists risk all for readers
By LISE OLSEN Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle
Nov. 22, 2008

Ciudad Juarez has long been known for gutsy and seasoned newspaper reporters who never shrank from a grisly crime scene.

I sat with a group of them at a reception for investigative journalists in Ciudad Juarez years ago when one editor's portable police radio crackled: A man had been shot dead in his plate of sushi at a luxury restaurant in an apparent organized crime hit. Everyone rushed out.

Despite spates of violence, law-abiding residents in Ciudad Juarez until recently experienced a murder rate generally below that of large U.S. cities like Houston, based on official crime and census statistics in both countries.

That changed with this year's murder boom that has claimed an astounding 1,300 victims.

The crime scene — and victim — at the Nov. 13 slaying was appallingly familiar. El Diario's veteran crime reporter, Armando Rodriguez, 11/13was shot dead in a company car in front of his own home as he prepared to drive his daughter to school.

He apparently was killed for doing a job that was important to us all.

Rodriguez was the only reporter in Juarez to keep a complete count of victims during the city's 2008 bloodbath. In 10 months, he'd written 901 stories. A veteran crime reporter who had worked for El Diario for more than a decade, Rodriguez was part of a small but vitally important network of border truth tellers. Together, these brave journalists and their employers enable others to track developments in the ongoing war between drug cartels and the Mexican military.

It's a war that is terrifyingly close to the U.S. border and has claimed American lives.

Molly Molloy, a New Mexico State University librarian who runs a leading border Web site and mailing lists, was among those who relied on Rodriguez' accurate tally and his consistent coverage to draw attention to the alarming wave of homicides.

The Mexico City-based press freedom advocacy group, the Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET), condemned the murder and related crimes as "attacks against society because they damage the right to be informed."

Elsewhere on the border, several key Mexican journalists had already fallen victim to the violence they so carefully documented and investigated. In 2004 alone, the top editors of two major border newspapers were executed: Francisco Ortiz Franco, of the influential weekly Zeta in Tijuana and Roberto Mora, of El Mañana, Nuevo Laredo's most powerful newspaper.

A few months later, in April 2005, Alfredo Jimenez Mota, primary crime reporter for El Imparcial, part of a chain of prominent family-owned newspapers in Sonora and Baja California, disappeared while investigating drug trafficking and organized crime.

The three murders from 2004-2005 silenced voices at newspapers that had dared to speak loudest about — and against — border violence at that time.

Officials at all three newspapers believed that organized crime was behind those killings. Their conclusions have been backed by non-profit groups that also investigated them.

The Committee to Protect Journalists has determined that Ortiz Franco's murder was likely carried out by Arellano Felix Cartel members. Ortiz Franco had published two critical stories in the weeks before his death; one revealing connections between the cartel and a high level prosecutor's murder and another showing photos of fake police IDs used by cartel members that had been released at an FBI press conference in California.

Another group of nonprofits, including Reporters without Borders, denounced Tamaulipas authorities for being too determined to rule out Mora's newspaper work as a motive in his 2004 murder. They said investigators too quickly made a dubious case against two of his neighbors, including an American later murdered by an inmate in a Nuevo Laredo prison.

In the Jimenez case in 2005 in Sonora, there was never any real doubt that the reporter's disappearance was related to an ongoing investigation of drug traffickers. He vanished on his way to meet a source for that story and his body has never been found.

The publications that backed those murdered men have long been among the most professional and most persistent in covering drug trafficking and related violence in Northern Mexico, along with others, such as El Diario and Norte in Ciudad Juarez and El Debate in Sinaloa, which earlier this week had a grenade lobbed inside its offices, though fortunately no one was injured.

Officials at El Mañana, Zeta and El Imparcial all denounced killings that they believed were meant to silence them. They pushed authorities to seek justice.

But El Imparcial then announced it would no longer investigate organized crime.

El Mañana eventually abandoned coverage of most murders and took bylines off crime stories after its office was attacked in February 2006 by two hooded gunmen carrying automatic weapons who set off a hand grenade inside and shot and wounded journalist Jaime Orozco Tey.

Even Zeta — a Tijuana weekly famous for its sometimes controversial mix of investigation and advocacy — seems to have become less aggressive after the murder of Ortiz and the subsequent death from cancer of founder Jesus Blancornelas in November 2006.

Jesus Blancornelas, a legendary border editor who had survived an attack on his own life back in 1997 that killed his bodyguard, had spent decades denouncing violence and corruption in Tijuana. For years, he'd lived under guard in a virtual fortress in California, yet continued to aggressively investigate those he believed had slain Zeta's cofounder back in 1988 and later Ortiz in 2004.

By comparison, journalists in Ciudad Juarez had reason to feel somewhat more secure.

Until 2008.

This year alone, at least two reporters have fled from death threats into El Paso, including Carlos Huerta, a reporter for Norte de Ciudad de Juarez. His newspaper subsequently told readers that it would report about "dead bodies and not investigations."

Earlier this year, another Juarez journalist facing threats, Emilio Gutierrez Soto of El Diario, sought asylum in the U.S. (He's still waiting.)

Editors at El Diario, a family-owned newspaper with considerable clout and respect in Mexico, took steps to protect its reporters but has continued to cover crime.

In a disturbing story El Diario published last Sunday that was signed only "Staff," the newspaper reported that many other Juarez journalists have changed jobs, abandoned beats or left their homes because of the violence. "They told me that I was next," El Diario quoted one who had abandoned his media Web site.

El Diario also wrote that narcos had been using the official municipal police radio frequencies this year to warn newspaper photographers away from crime scenes "because the same thing could happen to them."

It seems clear both from what's now happening in Juarez and what has happened in other border cities in the last four years that drug traffickers want to kill with impunity — and to stop even the best newspapers in Mexico from covering their bloody war.

They seem to be getting closer to achieving that terrible goal.

Rodriguez' own murder happened almost a week after criminals left a human head in the city's Plaza of the Journalist.

Since 2000, 24 journalists have been killed in Mexico, at least seven directly because of their reporting on crime, according to CPJ. Seven others have disappeared.

Rodriguez' death has left a heavy burden on his colleagues.

Yet it should not fall to reporters in the Mexican press alone to cover the carnage.

This systematic silencing of journalists by threats and by violence has become an ominously effective tool that may have the power to erase coverage of the ongoing cartel war.

Without journalists like Rodriguez to cover such crimes, little can be learned about murders from inadequate police investigations and shoddy or even non-existent forensic evidence. In some cases, border journalists say, cartel hit men have been able to boldly return to remove bodies from murder scenes or abduct surviving witnesses.

For years, many of the best U.S. newspapers relied heavily on coverage in these leading Mexican border newspapers — and on valuable information anonymously supplied by their veteran reporters — to learn what was really happening on the border.

Sometimes, Mexican reporters shared information with U.S. colleagues that they could not publish for fear of reprisals. Sometimes, U.S. reporters helped their colleagues get revealing documents from U.S. courts.

That quiet tradition of sharing information and mutually publishing the toughest stories has helped everyone do a better job on covering the U.S.-Mexico border.

But over the years, many major U.S. newspapers, beset by budget difficulties, have reduced the numbers of what had been a small but relatively effective and well-informed network of border correspondents.

In some cases, U.S. reporters have refused to cross the border to visit Mexican crime scenes themselves because of the danger.

At times, U.S. newspapers have forbidden their reporters to visit certain border towns in response to threats.

The death of Armando Rodriguez puts us all in a terrible position. Who will continue his work? Who will press for justice in his case and in so many others that remain unsolved? Who will speak for the dead?

And will we allow the wave of violence on the very doorstep of the United States to be ignored?

www.chron.com

The evil is at the doorstep.

Dixie

You have to wonder who it is having these journalists killed. Who would have more an interest in silencing those reporting on just how bad this is......the Mexican government or the cartels??

The cartels would be more likely to welcome the attention of the press as a way to intimidate the population and excercise control, as well as to taunt the police and government.

On the other hand, the Mexican government might not be so inclined to want the full extent of the severity known. After all, they are losing $$$ as tourism declines and businesses hesitate to open there and/or close down due to the violence. That they have not gotten any kind of of control over this, and so many of their police, military, and government officials are being exposed as criminal and corrupt, may very well have Calderon and others concerned about unwelcome scrutiny into their own activities or just be a huge embarassment.And of course the last thing they want is for the US to respond by making it even more difficult for their illegals and drug traffickers to enter or remain in this country, cutting ties with Mexico and putting a lid on the piggy bank of funds to, allegedly, help them fight this.

It wouldn't be the first time a government took steps to silence a media and journalists they found to be problematic.