Censor or die: The death of Mexican news in the age of drug cartels

Washington Post: As deadline descended on El Mañana’s newsroom and reporters rushed to file their stories, someone in the employ of a local drug cartel called with a demand from his crime boss.

The caller was a journalist for another newspaper, known here as an enlace, or “link” to the cartel. The compromised journalist barked out the order: Publish an article saying the mayor in Matamoros had not paid the cartel $2 million a month in protection fees, as an El Mañana front-page story had alleged the day before.

“They want us to say he’s not guilty,” the editor who took the call told his colleagues during the episode in late October. Knowing glances passed between them as a visiting Washington Post reporter looked on.

They all knew that defiance carried a high price. Read more.

Drug Tunnels Along the U.S.-Mexico Border: High Costs, High Rewards

Newsweek: More than 80 tunnels have been discovered between Mexico and the United States since 2006, most recently this past Thursday after a six-month investigation by the U.S. government resulted in a large smuggling tunnel being uncovered, as well as 22 arrests and the recovery of 12 tons of marijuana.

The tunnel, about 32 feet underground, runs about 2,880 feet, between the Otay Center Warehouse in San Diego and another warehouse in Tijuana. In a statement, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Finn said the tunnel is believed to have a railroad system, lighting and electricity throughout.

A message to Mexico on abuses

mySA: The United States, in the interest of bilateral harmony, has been looking the other way too long when it comes to Mexico’s human rights abuses. That the State Department found it could do so no longer says something about our southern neighbor’s continuing slide into that morass under the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto.

The U.S. is withholding only a fraction — $5 million — of the $195 million in Merida Initiative funding to aid in the fight against vicious drug cartels. This is meant to send a message that the United States will no longer take Mexico’s assurances on human rights at face value. Read more.

U.S. Cuts Off $5 Million in Security Aid to Mexico

WSJ: Signaling disapproval of recent human rights violations in Mexico, the U.S. government is withholding $5 million in funding for the country’s security and judicial system, officials have confirmed.

The money is a small fraction in funding that was to be disbursed by the State Department this year under the eight year old Merida Initiative, through which the U.S. Congress so far has appropriated more than $2.3 billion in aid earmarked to train and equip Mexico’s security forces and to improve its judicial system.

Old Cartels Never Really Die…

FSN News: Despite recurrent pronouncements of death by some U.S. and Mexican officials, high-profile organized crime groups continue operating and shedding blood south of the border. Tijuana, where control of both the local and export drug business is the prize of contention, figures once again as a significant flashpoint of violence.

Violent rivalries were on public display this past week as at least five so-called narcomantas, or narco banners, were placed in highly visible spots in the Baja California border city of an estimated 1.6 million people.

New state law obliges business to pay salaries of missing people

Mexico News Daily: Mexican businesses have an obligation to support the families of employees who are among those who have disappeared, largely due to the drug war violence that began in 2006. That’s the gist of a new law in the state of Coahuila, but it has its detractors.

Many businesses are not happy with the prospect of having to continue paying salaries on behalf of employees who are no longer working, and at the same time pay someone else to do it. Read more. 

Advocates for Press Freedoms Take Action for Slain US Reporter Brad Will

For Immediate Release

(Houston, May 1) Advocates for press freedom and human rights are pressuring President Obama to remember murdered US journalist, Brad Will, who was slain in broad daylight by Mexican government-backed paramilitaries over six years ago. They issued an 'Action Alert' today, for people who shared their concern with the impunity with which the murder of a US journalist has been greeted in Mexico, to contact senior Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont. The alert urged Senator Leahy to ask the President, on his trip to Mexico this week, to "raise to Mexican President Nieto publicly the lack of sound prosecution of the shooters who murdered Brad Will and . . .(to) insist that accountability for his murder, and the murder of other journalists, mostly Mexican, who had, before they were killed, been publishing stories of corruption and brutality by top Mexican government officials, be achieved promptly".

Senator Leahy was instrumental in inserting a requirement for an investigation into Brad Will's murder in earlier appropriations for Plan Mexico, a militarization package that has poured guns and other lethal aid into the Mexican military and police, forces that are widely seen as unaccountable, corrupt and which systematically abuse human rights. The resulting violence has contributed to the estimated 100,000 murders of civilians many of whom were innocent bystanders uninvolved in the drug trade.

As the Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, Senator Leahy has the power to influence President Obama's discussions with President Nieto of Mexico, a major recipient of US military aid.

Brad Will was murdered in broad daylight over six years ago. There were many witnesses. Mexican government officials, at least four of them, were identified as the shooters. Yet only two were questioned by the Mexican prosecutor's office and both let go without charge.

Mexican activists release blimp to urge US to stop arms from pouring into Mexico

The Washington Post 
By Associated Press
April 29, 2013

MEXICO CITY — Mexican anti-violence activists have released a blimp as part of a campaign to urge President Barack Obama to stop arms trafficking into Mexico.

Peace activist Javier Sicilia and the Mexico chapter of Amnesty International say the blimp is part of a “virtual” campaign to put attention on the problem of guns ahead of Obama’s visit to Mexico on Thursday.

Sicilia and other activists are urging Mexicans to tweet with the hashtag “Goodbye to weapons.” The slogan is printed on the blimp, which traveled from outside the Museum of Memory and Tolerance to the U.S. Embassy.

Sicilia said Monday that activists hope to collect 1 million signatures urging Obama and Mexican President Pena Nieto to discuss halting the flow of weapons into Mexico.

President Obama's Mexico visit comes with backdrop of uncertainty

Los Angeles Times
By Shashank Bengali and Tracy Wilkinson
April 28, 2013

WASHINGTON — President Obama travels to Mexico this week amid signs that the relationship between the United States and its southern neighbor's new government faces a new period of uncertainty after years of unprecedented closeness forged by the deadly war against Mexican drug cartels.

The government of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is said to be wary of the level of U.S. involvement in security affairs that characterized the administration of his predecessor, Felipe Calderon. As a result, the Mexican government is expected to narrow U.S. involvement in its attorney general's office and Interior Ministry, the agencies that oversee police and intelligence, current and former U.S. and Mexican officials say.

Instead, Peña Nieto and officials from his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, want to concentrate U.S. participation in less sensitive but potentially profitable areas such as the economy.  Read more. 

Mexico Violence: Clashes Between Federal Police, Gunmen Leave 14 Dead

Huffington Post 
April 11, 2013

Morelia, Mexico - At least 14 people died Wednesday in a series of clashes between gunmen and federal police in Michoacan state, a western area that has seen a surge of violence in recent years attributed to drug cartels, authorities said.

Federal police said in a statement the first gunbattle began when officers aboard a helicopter spotted armed men traveling in four vehicles in the town of Gabriel Zamora.

The gunmen opened fire on the agents, who shot back and killed five assailants, the statement said.

It said one of those killed was high in the leadership structure of a Michoacan-based drug cartel, but didn't identify the group.

Hours later in the town of Apatzingan, federal agents were accompanying a caravan of citizens commemorating the anniversary of the death of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata when gunmen fired shots at some of the participants. Police killed one of the gunmen, authorities said.  Read more. 

Body-snatchers in Mexico?

I've been hearing a lot of off-the-record reports from journalist friends about a editorial board pressures to stop reporting on deaths. The general line is that government wants to show some progress (although Peña Nieto has now asked for a year to decrease the violence) and so the easiest way to reduce the figures is to stop counting.

This article could be part of that new tendency. The disappearance of bodies, suppression of the press, local officials encouraged to under-count-all; this bodes ill for those of us trying to track the drug war.

Miami Herald 
By Christopher Sherman
Associated Press

Reynosa, Mexico -- Heavy gunfire echoed along the main thoroughfare and across several neighborhoods in a firefight that lasted for hours, leaving perforated and burned vehicles scattered across the border city.

Social media exploded with reports of dozens dead. Witnesses saw at least 12.

But the hours of intense gun battles in Reynosa on March 10 gave way to an official body count the next day of a head-scratching two.

The men who handle the city's dead insist the real figure is upward of 35, likely even more than 50. Ask where those bodies are and they avert their eyes and shift in their seats.

Cartel members, they say, are retrieving and burying their own casualties.

"Physically, there are no bodies," said Ramon Martinez, director of Funerales San Jose in Reynosa, who put the toll at between 40 and 50. "It's very delicate."

If Reynosa is an example, even the government can't count how many are dying from drug violence. The Felipe Calderon government stopped counting in September 2011. Since President Enrique Pena Nieto took office Dec. 1, the government has issued monthly statistics, saying that January killings were down slightly from December, and that February saw the lowest number of killings in 40 months - without providing numbers for the other 39 months.

253,000 U.S. guns smuggled to Mexico annually, study finds

The Miami Herald 
By Tim Johnson
McClatchy Newspapers

Mexico City -- Some 2.2 percent of all U.S. gun sales are made to smuggling rings that take firearms to Mexico, a scale of illegal trafficking that’s “much higher than widely assumed,” an academic study released Monday found.

An average of 253,000 weapons purchased in the United States head south of the border each year, according to the study by four scholars at the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and the Igarape Institute, a research center in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Profit margins at many gun stores are razor thin, and thousands of U.S. gun vendors would go out of business without the illicit traffic to Mexico, said Topher McDougal, an economist educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who’s one of the study’s authors.

The study’s conclusions are likely to add to controversy over what role U.S. weapons smugglers play in Mexico’s drug violence. Mexican officials have long blamed lax gun laws in the United States for the availability of weapons in Mexico, which has only one gun store and considers gun ownership a privilege, not a right.

The value of the annual smuggling trade is $127.2 million, says the study, “The Way of the Gun: Estimating Firearms Traffic Across the U.S.-Mexico Border.”  Read more. 

Mexico's 'Crisis Of Disappearance': Families Seek Answers

NPR by Carrie Kahn

February 21, 2013

Maximina Hernandez says she begged her 23-year old son, Dionicio, to give up his job as a police officer in a suburb of Monterrey. Rival drug cartels have been battling in the northern Mexican city for years.

But he told her being a police officer was in his blood, a family tradition. He was detailed to guard the town's mayor.

In May 2007, on his way to work, two men wearing police uniforms stopped Dionicio on a busy street, pulled him from his car and drove him away. That same day, the mayor's other two bodyguards were also abducted. Witnesses say the kidnappers wore uniforms of an elite anti-drug police unit. The three men haven't been seen since.  Read more.  

Twitter: The Safest Place for Citizen Journalists in Mexico

Mashable: Fran Berkman

A cohort of Twitter users with fake names and profile pictures have become a trusted source of information regarding drug cartel violence in Mexico.

These citizen journalists choose to remain anonymous to avoid violent backlash from gang members, but their reports have become increasingly influential.

On Jan. 8, a team from Microsoft Research published a paper called "The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare," which details a social media study conducted over the past two years. Their main finding was that as Mexicans increasingly turn to Twitter for reports of violence, a core of mostly anonymous yet trusted curators have led the dissemination of public safety information.

"You find this small cluster of people, whom we call curators, who tend to be really well-regarded in their cities," Andrés Monroy-Hernández, one of the paper's five co-authors, tells Mashable. "These particular curators are those that have a lot of followers, which means that they're somewhat trusted by the community."

In the paper, the authors discuss how difficult it was to contact and interview the curators, who feel the work puts their lives in danger. Read more. 

Harvard Slammed For Giving Ex-President Of Mexico, Felipe Calderón, One-Year Fellowship

The Huffington Post: January 7, 2013.

Harvard is taking flack for handing a fellowship to former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, who led an assault on organized crime that plunged his country into a human rights crisis.

Calderón is set to begin lecturing at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government this month as the university’s first Angelopoulous Global Public Leaders fellow. Critics point to the startling violence that characterized Calderón’s presidency, saying he shouldn’t be rewarded with a paid position at a prestigious university.

“In awarding Mr. Calderón a high-profile fellowship, the Kennedy School is telling the world that former leaders, however questionable their leadership, are worthy of recognition,” Marion Lloyd, a Harvard alum and researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education. “It is an unfortunate and dangerous message.”

An estimated 60,000 people died violent deaths during Calderón’s presidency. Mexico’s attorney general has documented 25,000 disappearances during that time. Read more. 

Mexico's President Alters Tactics Against Drug Crimes

NPR, by Carrie Kahn

Mexico's new attorney general says there are now 60 to 80 drug cartels operating in the country, a sharp rise from the 10 that existed when outgoing President Calderon took office in 2006. President Enrique Pena Nieto says he wants to go after crime associated with drug trafficking instead of taking down crime bosses. Listen to the story. 

Mexico focus on police commanders in CIA shooting

By E. EDUARDO CASTILLO | Associated Press

MEXICO CITY (AP) — In a strange and aggressive attack by Mexican federal police on a U.S. Embassy vehicle that was pumped with 152 bullets, one major question remains: Why?

Mexican investigators are looking for the answer from five police commanders who are accused of ordering 14 officers to lie about what happened on Aug. 24 south of Mexico City, where two CIA officers and a Mexican Navy captain came under heavy fire while travelling in an armored SUV clearly marked by diplomatic plates.

The police officers, who wounded the Americans and face attempted murder charges, initially said they were in uniform and marked cars, and responded to fire from the SUV. But details of the attorney general's investigation released Sunday said they were in plains clothes, unmarked vehicles (including two of their personal cars) and under order at all times from their commanding officers.

"Commanders controlled by whom? Whose instructions were they following?" said one Mexican official with knowledge of the case.

The attorney general's office continues to investigate possible connections between the attack and organized crime, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.  Read more. 

Laura's Blog: Breaking the Silence in New York; Historic Harlem March to End the Drug War

The Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity arrived in New York today and hit the ground running. In the early evening, hundreds of caravan members and New York supporters met each other in Riverside Church to hear the testimonies of the drug war's devastation on both sides of the border. A mammoth, neogothic structure built by the Rockefellers, the church has a long history of housing causes for social justice. It was here on April 4, 1967 that  Martin Luther King made one of his last speeches before he was assassinated--a glaring indictment of the Viet Nam war.

In his speech, called "A Time to Break Silence", King cited his reasons to oppose the Viet Nam war. His words apply almost uncannily to the drug war today. Despite the difference in historical contexts and the differences between the two wars, their similarities and the truth of the words stand not only the test of time but the test of conscience as well.

Both wars were, and are, deadly; both unconventional for their time; both fought for motivations distinct from those professed to the people.

The first reason King listed to oppose the war was "the war as an enemy of the poor". He had watched as advances in fighting poverty and inequality were dismantled to feed the war machine. The trade-off was starkly obvious:

I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.

We also know that today. With a budget in crisis, social programs have been stripped in historic rollbacks of rights and living standards as the defense budget not only maintains its girth but grows. With the Middle East conflicts waning in attention, it's the drug war that has moved in to justify militarism's insatiable appetite.

In Mexico, where the financial crisis, free trade and governmental indifference have created some 12 million more poor people in just a few years, the drug war has absorbed an enormous part of the budget. The war economy in both countries has powerful backers, and the the drug war has the added advantage for them of not only keeping the poor poor, but eliminating a large number of them--behind bars or in mass graves.

That's, of course, King's second reason.

[The war] was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population.We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.

Today's drug war doesn't even have to send young men and women thousands of miles away. It puts them away right here at home. By the millions and with the same discriminatory criteria that sent the poor and African American to fight and die in Viet Nam.

The peace caravan from Mexico marched in a candlelight vigil through the heart of Harlem, Manhattan's poorest areas. A place where every day youth are plucked to fill the cells and coffers of a private prison system. Where drug laws do the dirty work of justifying criminalization based on race and poverty and treating victims as villains.

Carol Eady of Woman on the Rise Telling Her Story (WORTH), a former prisoner on drug charges who has kicked drugs and become an educator and community activist, explained at the church,

Many women in New York, and probably all over the world, are usually incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses. Most of the time, they started using drugs due to past abuse, abandonment by parents, victimization and sexual assaults. Instead of treating these occurrences as health hazards or diseases, when we turn to drugs to medicate our pain they lock us up.  

More than 400 people marched chanting 'No More Drug War' and calling for justice in the streets of Harlem. The "cruel manipulation of the poor" that King spoke of is the modus operandi of the drug war and the prisons are the new battlefields where young lives are lost.

King's third reason stemmed from his deep commitment to non-violence.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. 

Likewise, if we do not oppose the drug war, we cannot claim to be non-violent and credibly stand up against more conventional wars or invasions. The U.S. government's Merida Initiative promotes violence and militarization as a solution to drug trafficking. We either condone that and abandon all pretenses of non-violence or we oppose it, despite its political popularity and remain consistent in our beliefs.

By keeping silent since Bush launched the Merida Initiative in 2007, we have allowed the militarized drug war model to spread. Now both political parties have elevated counter-narcotics efforts to national security, as if a white powder used to get high could blow up the world or a corner dealer were tantamount to a terrorist. This is a blatant lie. We are supporting a prohibition model where Mexican communities suffer the presence of violent and corrupt security forces and drug gangs, both funded and armed, whether directly or indirectly, by our country.

Violence becomes the norm and moral outrage dulls through endless repetition.

Another reason is the "vocation of sonship and brotherhood", a religious calling that--when women are added into the language--demands making common cause and understanding the suffering of others. The peace caravan has over this past month forged those bonds and sought out that common cause. The victims, with their photos of murdered or missing loved ones and their stories of pain, have challenged the U.S. public to consider the devastation wrought by support of a drug war without end. 

The stories at Riverside--45 years later after MLK spoke out on Viet Nam--again broke the silence about the war. Not a war on a foreign continent, but a crossborder war that rages within our communities from Harlem to Jalisco. As the U.S. government extends the failed drug war from Colombia and Mexico, to Central America, the Caribbean and Africa, King's closing words fit as well now as then:

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent co annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam [or in the drug war] and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors.

This model of annihilation drags us all into more violence. We have alternatives. As hundreds of marchers moved through New York City with the pictures of the victims, calling for an end to the war--again--they carried us closer to what King called "a creative psalm of peace". 

And this time, the silence was broken in two languages.