Source: Houston Chronicle Contact: Sun, 21 Dec 1997 Page: 1 Website: http://www.chron.com/ Author: DUDLEY ALTHAUS LATIN JOURNALISTS FINDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH DEADLY Reporters the target of violence as stories focus on drug traders SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO, Mexico Edith Camacho ignores the pleas of her family to quit her receptionist's job when she goes to work each day at La Prensa, an embattled newspaper anchored on a dirt side street of this roughedged border town. One afternoon in July, Camacho, 19, was seated at her desk inside the newspaper's offices, when gunmen shot and killed her boss, owner and publisher Benjamin Flores, on the building's front doorstep. The staff of La Prensa blames local drug traffickers for the killing. In the months following Flores' murder, Camacho has stayed at her job despite a barrage of threats against the newspaper's employees. "They thought that by killing Benjamin, they were going to kill the newspaper," Camacho said recently. "But it's not happening. We continue on. And if they kill another of us, we'll continue. And another and another." Camacho's resolve apparently is shared by her colleagues at La Prensa, a 3,500circulation tabloid produced in a small house on the southern edge of San Luis, about a threehours' drive east of San Diego. Despite continuing death threats, none of the eight young reporters or the dozen or so members of the business staff has quit. The newspaper continues to run hardhitting stories about local drug traffickers and government officials. "These are people who are not going to be bought off," said Imanol Caneyada, a 29yearold La Prensa reporter. "When a journalist dies, it's a blow to society. It means anybody has the right to shut up anyone with bullets." Mexican journalists, especially those along the border with the United States, face a growing risk of violence spun by the political and economic influence of the drug trade. Like their colleagues in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, Mexican journalists willing to expose or criticize local gangsters and their allies within government have become targets of violence, shock absorbers in their society's confrontation with the narcotics underworld. Journalists have long been at risk in Latin America, a region known for creaky justice systems and a tentative hold on democratic government. But since the early 1980s, the threat to the press has increased along with the rise of the cocaine trade. In recent years, U.S. law enforcement officials say, control of cocaine trafficking has been shifting out of Colombia into Mexico and other countries. "In the past, nearly all assaults on journalists were linked to corruption of public officials," said the InterAmerican Press Association in a study published this year on violence against Mexican journalists. "More recently, drug trafficking also has been deeply involved." Across Latin America, at least 170 journalists have been murdered in the past nine years, according to IAPA. More than 20 of those men and women have died in Mexico, which trails only Colombia in terms of the number of journalists slain in the hemisphere. Nearly 70 Colombian journalists have been murdered since the late 1980s. This year, three journalists have been murdered in Mexico for what they have written, and three others have been slain in Colombia, according to the New Yorkbased Committee to Protect Journalists. Dozens of journalists in Mexico and Colombia have been kidnapped, assaulted or intimidated because of their profession in recent years. Five reporters in Mexico City were beaten in September in what analysts say were attempts to scare them off crime stories. "Although we don't want to admit it, Mexico is becoming Colombianized," said Tijuana lawyer Manuel Julia Beltran, using a term coined to describe the violence and corruption plaguing countries that produce or trade in narcotics. Julia, who runs a bookstore specializing in legal publications, said he once made a small fortune representing drug traffickers, but quit that line of work a decade ago when the narcotics trade became so violent. Several Tijuana lawyers have been murdered by drug gangs in recent years. The bookstore owner shook his head as about a hundred people marched past his shop in an upscale Tijuana neighborhood to protest last month's shooting of newspaper publisher Jesus Blancornelas. "Society is in danger," Julia said. Authorities suspect that Tijuana's cocainesmuggling cartel is responsible for the Nov. 27 attempted assassination of Blancornelas. Killed in the attack were the publisher's bodyguard and one of the assailants. Blancornelas, who was shot four times, was released from a Tijuana hospital Wednesday. The publisher's weekly newspaper, Zeta, has earned a reputation for exposing the tentacles of the drug trade in Tijuana and the rest of Baja California state. Recognizing the increased risks faced by members of the Mexican media, the Committee to Protect Journalists sponsored a workshop in early November to explore ways in which reporters and editors can protect themselves. Blancornelas was one of the featured speakers. "The first line of defense is good journalism," said Joel Simon, the committee's coordinator for Latin America. "But shoddy journalism doesn't justify execution." Though some Mexican journalists have clearly lost their lives because of gangster retaliation for stories, the motives behind other murders have remained murky. Many poorly paid Mexican journalists, especially those at small publications in the countryside, have been accused of blackmail and other illicit activities. But in Colombia, most journalists killed in recent decades had run afoul of drug smugglers, leftist guerrillas or rightwing henchmen. "It's very difficult to protect journalists," said Luis Gabriel Cano, the publisher of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, who recently stepped down as president of IAPA. "The journalist works under constant threats." Cano is all too familiar with the risks. He assumed control of El Espectador in 1986 after his brother, Guillermo, the publisher, was assassinated in front of the newspaper's offices by gunmen believed to have been sent by powerful cocaine smuggler Pablo Escobar. Escobar was incensed by the hardline position that the newspaper had taken toward the drug trade, Cano said. Escobar, who was killed by police four years ago, was suspected in the 1989 bombing of El Espectador's offices. Since his brother was killed, 11 employees of the Bogota newspaper have been murdered, Cano said. "The journalist in Colombia, as in other parts of the region, has always worked under threats against himself and his family," he said. "It's very difficult to work with absolute freedom." Colombian journalists killed this year include Gerardo Bedoya, an editorial writer for El Pais, the largest newspaper in Cali, who had repeatedly called for the extradition of the country's most powerful drug traffickers. This month, leftist guerrillas who wanted to send a "peace message" to the Colombian government kidnapped a spokesman for President Ernesto Samper and a radio journalist. The two were released to the Red Cross last week. The travails of Colombian journalists have mirrored those of their society in general. Billions of dollars from the cocaine trade have fed a spiral of bloodshed in the South American country over the past two decades, providing funding to leftist guerrillas waging civil war in the countryside, fomenting gang violence in the cities and encouraging government corruption. In contrast, much of Mexican society, at least in urban centers where most people live, has been spared the bloodiest effects of the narcotics trade. Drugrelated bloodshed remains largely limited to feuds between trafficking gangs or to the assassinations of police officers, prosecutors and judges suspected of dealings with smugglers. Still, at least some Mexican journalists have been targeted by the narcotics underworld. Perhaps nowhere have the risks been greater than along the U.S. border, where powerful smuggling organizations have held sway for years and disputes seem to end in shootings as often as in shouting. "The north of Mexico is a very dangerous place for journalists," said Jesus Barraza, the 32yearold managing editor of La Prensa. "(But) if we have to talk of (the drug trade), we talk about it. If we have to speak about government corruption, we do." Flores, who was 29 when he died, founded La Prensa five years ago after finding local journalism wanting, Barraza said. Like many smalltown publishers in Mexico, the strong willed Flores used his newspaper as a battering ram against all he saw as wrong with San Luis Rio Colorado. The town, across the border from Yuma. Ariz., is a raw, raucous place. The population has more than doubled to 200,000 people in the past decade. Almost everyone, it seems, is from somewhere else. Newcomers arrive daily from the Mexican interior, hoping to find work in the foreignowned factories called maquiladoras that have sprung up in town, to slip across the border to work the irrigated fields near Yuma or to make their way to Los Angeles. Anchored at the top of the Gulf of California, a favorite smuggling route for decades, the city served as an early center of Mexico's narcotics trade. First marijuana and heroin, then cocaine and methamphetamines were smuggled by the truckload across the border. U.S. law enforcement officials consider the smugglers who rose to prominence here in the 1960s as role models for the huge cocainetrafficking organizations that now hold sway in Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Matamoros and other Mexican border cities. San Luis' long relationship with the narcotics industry has helped produce an estimated 8,000 heroin addicts, an astounding number for a city its size. Police and journalists blame the addicts for the city's plague of theft and petty crime. "It's a big social problem here," Barraza said. "What happens if the kids are using heroin and don't have money? They rob, they assault." >From the start, La Prensa's style was aggressive: long on accusations of local corruption and wrongdoing, sometimes short on proof and balance. The title of Flores' regular column, "Unconfirmed," may best illustrate his reporting philosophy. "Many times we turn into a protagonist more than a witness, pushing things," Caneyada said of the journalists at La Prensa. "But we are participants in a changing society, and making errors is worthwhile." Flores' troubles with local gangsters began in 1993 soon after he started his newspaper, when he began writing about members of a local family widely suspected of trafficking narcotics. That same year, he filed a formal complaint accusing one member of the family of threatening to kill him. Authorities did not pursue the complaint, Barraza said. "There are people in the government who are interested that journalists are annihilated," he said. Police arrested several men soon after Flores' murder, accusing them of the crime. But La Prensa's staff insists that the real killers remain free. The newspaper publishes a complaint to authorities daily in the space where Flores' column once appeared, demanding that the murder case be solved. Perhaps because of the sensational style of some Mexican publications and the unsavory reputations of some journalists, many people seem to shrug at the dangers that reporters face. At a rally held in San Luis last summer to protest Flores' murder, only a few hundred people showed up, Caneyada said. Most of those who attended were family or friends of the slain journalist. "The lack of solidarity is amazing," the reporter said. "If no one complains, it is going to be very easy to kill journalists." Earlier this month in Tijuana, only about 100 people almost all of them journalists took part in a march to protest the shooting of newspaper publisher Blancornelas, even though the rally had been advertised on television and in newspapers, Motorcycle police blocked downtown traffic as the marchers weaved their way past state and federal offices toward a monument to freedom of speech. People emerged from shops and restaurants to watch the demonstrators pass. Motorists shot irritated frowns at the protesters, but none honked horns or gave other indications of support. "People know the system, and they know the government is not going to do anything," said Julia, the bookstore owner. "So we don't have much support for this sort of thing." A similar protest march following the 1988 killing of Hector Felix Miranda, Blancornelas' founding partner at Zeta, drew 4,000 protesters. Two security men employed by Jorge Hank Rhon, a member of one of Mexico's leading political families, were convicted of the murder. In San Luis, the shooting of Blancornelas has renewed old fears for Barraza and his staff at La Prensa. "It's difficult to work, thinking that just around the corner there is someone who wants to shoot you," Barraza said. "It changes your work. It changes your life. You live your life in fear." For now, however, the greatest challenge facing Barraza and his team of young reporters is to keep La Prensa going. When Flores died, he left the newspaper in debt, Barraza said. But advertising and subscriptions continue to grow, Barraza added. La Prensa staff members, most of whom earn only about $100 a week, are determined to keep the tabloid independent and vital, he said. "We are going to be an influential and prosperous newspaper," said Barraza, sitting behind the desk that Flores once occupied. "I am sure of it." Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle Mexico City Bureau