Mexico: Drug war silences journalists
Decapitated bodies, battles in broad daylight, massacres at wedding receptions—hardly a day goes by without the war between rival drug gangs and the army’s crackdown on the cartels in Mexico making headlines. Yet journalists are growing increasingly silent.
The reporter's phone rings just a few days after his report on the arrest of several members of the Zeta drug gang was broadcast on television. The voice on the other end of the line gets straight to the point: "My job is not to warn you, but to kill you. If you carry on like this, our paths will soon cross."
The father of the family is shocked. "They knew everything about me: where I live, how many children I have and what their names are," explains the journalist, who no longer wants to see his name published for fear of the drug cartels' revenge. And his fate is no exception in Mexico.
In recent years, the northern Mexican states on the border with the USA, for whose market the majority of South American drugs are destined, have become a scene of unprecedented violence.
More dangerous than in Afghanistan
However, reports on the drug war are appearing less and less in the local media. This is because more and more Mexican journalists are censoring their own reporting - for fear of revenge from the drug gangs or the corrupt police officers who are on the payrolls of the cartels.
Some also feel intimidated by soldiers, who often do not take human rights very seriously themselves in the fight against the drug cartels and thus also become the subject of critical research.
Other journalists are even afraid of moles in their own editorial offices, who are paid by the cartels to ensure positive press and smear critical colleagues.
Hardly any journalist dares to talk about it openly. But the figures speak for themselves. According to statistics from the Committee to Protect Reporters, at least 42 Mexican journalists have been killed in the past five years. This makes Mexico more dangerous for members of the press than Afghanistan, for example.
The Mexican Human Rights Commission has even counted 50 reporters killed since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006, when he also ordered the military to take up arms against the cartels. However, this has only exacerbated the conflict.
Unpunished murders
"What we do is a kind of survival journalism. It's a tightrope act," says Ismail Bojorquez, head of the weekly newspaper Rio Doce in the north-western state of Sinaloa. The drug war rages particularly fiercely there.
The Committee to Protect Reporters also speaks of a climate of fear that prevails in editorial offices. The fight against the cartels is the most important issue in Mexico, explains a spokesperson. "But the media practically don't touch it."
The Mexican government set up a special department to investigate the murders of journalists. However, most of the crimes have so far gone unpunished.
And this is probably also true of the latest case: In the port city of Veracruz, journalist Yolanda Ordaz, who had been writing for a local daily newspaper for more than 20 years, recently disappeared. She reappeared a short time later: The murderers dumped the decapitated body in front of the editorial building of a competing local newspaper. (SDA)
