Mexican Journalists Under Continuous Threat for Coverage of Cartel Wars

By Michel Marizco, KJZZ News, for Fronteras

NOGALES, SONORA MEXICO –  As Mexico’s drug cartels fight for dominance, reporters have fallen victim to physical threats, even murder.  In the last six years, at least 67 Mexican journalists were killed, making them among the most targeted reporters in the world.  Under the new president, the attacks appear to have increased, leading to news blackouts along the border.

Hiram Gonzalez stands on a quiet street in Nogales, Mexico.  He’s watching two men peering through the bars of the border fence into the US.  One is talking feverishly into a cellphone while the other scrambles up the 25 foot border wall in seconds.  Both men are oblivious to a pair of reporters standing on the street just beneath them watching until the man on the cellphone turns around.

THUG:  “Fotos no quiero!”

GONZALEZ:  “It’s just for radio.”

The man doesn’t want photos taken, of course.  Gonzalez tells him it’s just a radio story.  The men slouch down the street shooting glances back over their shoulders before disappearing into an alleyway.  Gonzalez is amused; he stops to light a cigarette, juggling a cellphone in his free hand.

Just a pair of smuggler spotters, he says.  These scenes aren’t new for Gonzalez.  As a newspaper and television crime reporter, he’s covered gunbattles live and seen government officials arrested for corruption.  With them, always a lingering threat.  It’s one that hangs over all of Mexico’s border reporters.  Last year, he accidentally drove into the aftermath of a gunfight.  He was recognized; the gunmen assumed he was there to report.

GONZALEZ:  “Llamaron a la oficina donde yo trabajo y dicen que van a venir por mi.”

The same day, they called him at the newspaper to threaten him.  Last summer, Gonzalez’s home was broken into.  Nothing was stolen.  They left him a message.

GONZALEZ: “Te vas a morir reporter.”

“Reporter, you’re going to die” it said, spelled out in hot sauce on the kitchen table.  The Committee to Protect Journalists has consistently named Mexico as one of the deadliest places in the world for reporters.  Carlos Lauria runs the organization’s Latin America program.

LAURIA:  “Many reporters and media are cowing to silence because they fear reprisal from organized crime and corrupt public officials.”

In the last 2 months,  a newspaper and a television station in Ciudad Juarez were attacked in drive by shootings.  A reporter in the border town of Ojinaga was gunned down.  Then five employees of a Coahuila news agency were kidnapped.  Threats were spelled out on banners along a highway.  The news agency announced it will no longer cover organized crime.  In Reynosa, a gunfight reportedly happened with as many as 30 dead.  The only account was in a US newspaper.  To the CPJ’s Lauria, the pattern is simple- those trying to stop newsgathering, are winning.

LAURIA:  “You have organized crime exerting control OVER LARGE PARTS OF THE COUNTRY without having to resort to lethal violence.”

Emily Edmonds is a political science professor who works with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Latin America office.

EDMONDS:  “Very smart, very rational people are starting to turn away and say, journalism is not worth my life.”

As for Gonzalez, well, he says he hasn’t given up yet.  He talks about his job while punching a number into a cellphone in one hand, holds a cigarette in the other and somehow still manages to navigate a sharp U-turn into oncoming traffic.  With violent crime falling in Nogales, he’s turned to looking at drug smuggling, especially DRUG tunnels.  But first, he wants to investigate who built a massive shrine in town to the icon of organized crime, Santa Muerte.