Thread: Mexican reporters face bullets and intimidation

Mexican reporters face bullets and intimidation
NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico (Reuters) - Suspected drug cartel enforcers spray a newsroom with gunfire and a state governor is accused of trying to silence a reporter by jailing her, two of the latest signs that Mexico is turning more dangerous for journalists.

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Last week gunmen burst into the offices of the daily El Manana newspaper in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas, tossing a smoke grenade into the lobby and raking the newsroom with automatic weapons fire.

City beat reporter Jaime Orozco was shot five times as he attempted to flee and remains in a coma in a Nuevo Laredo hospital, suffering from serious spinal injuries.

Late on Wednesday, newspaper sources said, two photographers were chased at high speeds by six rifle-toting men packed into a pickup truck, after they had been sent out to cover a traffic accident west of the city. They escaped.

That harassment came after disclosure of an alleged plot by a Mexican state governor and a leading businessman to jail a reporter after she wrote a book detailing the workings of pedophile and child pornography rings.

Journalist and activist Lydia Cacho was arrested in December in the Caribbean resort of Cancun and driven across country to Puebla, where she was charged with defaming businessman Kamel Nacif in her book "The Demons of Eden."

A tape broadcast by a Mexican radio station and published in a national newspaper this week apparently carried a conversation between Puebla state Governor Mario Marin and Nacif celebrating Cacho's arrest. Marin has denied the voice on the tape was his.

International media watchdogs have protested the incidents and warned that such acts of intimidation jeopardize the democratic process in a key year for Mexico, which has a presidential election on July 2.

"Democracy is suffering because problems that affect the daily lives of Mexican citizens are going unreported," Carlos Lauria of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists told Reuters by telephone.

"In one case you have a governor harassing a journalist, while on the other you have a situation ... which is leading to self-censorship," he added.

El Manana gave up investigative reporting after editor Roberto Mora was stabbed to death in March 2004 in a murder that is still unsolved.

SLIM HOPES FOR CHANGE

The Mexican government has condemned both the attack on El Manana and the apparent conspiracy against Cacho in recent days, with President Vicente Fox's office calling for a full investigation of both cases.

The federal attorney general's office, meanwhile, announced the creation of a special prosecutor's office to investigate crimes against journalists this week, although it will not investigate cases involving organized crime.

But despite the initiatives, journalists working in communities on the U.S.-Mexico border, where at least four reporters, editors and columnists have been murdered in the past two years, remain skeptical.

They point out that federal investigators probed the cases of radio journalist Guadalupe Garcia, who was shot in Nuevo Laredo last April, and crime reporter Alfredo Jimenez, who vanished in northern Sonora state the same month, but charged no suspects.

"It's just a demagogic act that won't have any practical results," said Arturo Solis, a Reynosa-based human rights activist and online newspaper editor. "Harassment is daily, self-censorship is very strong (and) the criminals are capable of anything."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060217/wl_ ... _mexico_dc

AND THEY WONDER WHY WE WANT TO KEEP THEM OUT OF THE COUNTRY? EVEN SO THAT MANY PEOPLE MIGHT BE FLEEING THIS, HOW DO WE KNOW WHO'S WHO WHEN THEY GET HERE, AND WHAT THEY DID DOWN THERE?

SUCH A CORRUPT WAY OF LIFE. WE DO NOT WANT IT HERE.

Very sad that such places exist.