After the story was published on 8 April, the newspaper was immediately the hit with a cyber attack, according to El Periodico’s publisher, José Rubén Zamora. The website went dead and nobody could read the story for a few days. Readers who did manage to access the website had their computers infected with a virus. The attack was the latest salvo against the daily, which focuses on exposing government corruption. Zamora said it was the sixth attack against its website in the last year. He said each attack had occurred after the newspaper published investigations into corruption in Molina’s government. Zamora said that they have been investigating the attacks — which have been coming from a neighbourhood in Guatemala City. “We will pinpoint the exact area soon”, he said. The Inter American Press Association wrote a letter to Guatemala’s government expressing their concern over the attacks.

According to Zamora, officials have pulled government advertising from the newspaper, and constantly harass independent advertisers who work with the daily. In the last two decades, Zamora has been at the helm of two newspapers. His first paper was Siglo Veintuno, which he left after disagreeing with his co-owners over the paper’s robust coverage of corruption and government abuses. He has been target of kidnappings and death threats, and even had his home invaded by armed men in 2003, who held his wife and three sons hostage for several hours at gunpoint. Zamora won the Committee to Protect Journalists Freedom of the Press award in 1995, and in 2000 was named World Press Freedom Hero by the International Press Institute.

I asked Zamora why he continues to put his life in danger with government exposés:

Ana Arana: You knew the danger with this story, why did you want to publish it?

José Rubén Zamora: It is indispensable to stop the corruption and self-enrichment by the Guatemalan political class. They forget that our country is overwhelmed by misery, malnourished children, and racism. Guatemala is a country without counterweights or institutional balances to protect it from abuses. That is why to write about these stories is our obligation. If we did not focus on these issues, why should we exist?

Our stories are written so Guatemalans get strong and do not accept abuses of those in power. We also do it to get information on corrupt practices and human rights violations in Guatemala out in the international community.

AA: What is the real problem in Guatemala?

JRZ: I think there is an excessive concentration of power and money, and a serious penetration of organised crime, especially drug trafficking organisations, in  spheres of power.

AA: Do you fear any further attacks against the newspaper?

JRZ: Yes, I expect them to harass us through taxes, and to engage in defamation campaigns to discredit the newspaper. Sources close to the Presidency have said that the government is trying to organised a commercial boycott that could take the newspaper towards bankruptcy.

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But police in this city have decided to focus on a more serious threat — miniskirts. General Javier Aguayo y Camargo, head of public security in this embattled border town and a retired army brigadier, has  ordered a ban on women and men wearing miniskirts, imposing an 800 peso fine (about £42) on those who disobey.

He said the bill was aimed at transvestites and prostitutes, rather than women in general. Wearing miniskirts, according to Agudelo, violates the decency and well being of residents of Ciudad Acua, and can also be used to ”commit several sorts of crimes,” including luring kidnapping victims, and men using bathrooms intended for the opposite sex.

The police will allow prostitutes to wear mini skirts and other tiny attire in the red light district. But if they attempt to venture into downtown areas dressed in such a manner, they will be taken to jail for up to 36 hours, said local police.

About 50 people have been taken to jail since the edict was put into motion a few weeks ago. Aguayo y Camargo has deflected criticism, saying he is only following the law under Article 42 of the Public Morality code.

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The conflict over how Mexico City accepted $5 million dollars from Azerbaijan to build the statue, as well as a park, has been brewing since November. The agreement to build the statue was reached by the leftist government of the Partido de la Revolucion Democratica (PRD) after some of its representatives traveled to Azerbaijan in an all expenses paid junket the previous year.

It wasn’t until the statue was up that there were rumblings from other European ambassadors. Aliyev’s not so clean past was revealed in the local press, including the fact that he had probably engaged in pogroms against Armenian citizens.

Mexicans began to consider whether they should bring down the statue. Initially the Azerbaijan ambassador, Ilgar Mukhtárov, threatened to break off relations if the statue was removed. The Christmas holidays slowed down the conflict. But finally, in late January, the Azerbaijan embassy and city officials agreed to move the statue to another more suitable place in Mexico City — a storage area.

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MEXICO CITY – It was 38 minutes into the First Division football match at the Santos Modelo Stadium, about 275 miles from the US border, when players suddenly started running from the pitch to their locker rooms. Popping sounds interrupted the announcers. More than one million Mexican television viewers watched as a firefight between the country’s most ruthless drug cartel and local police unfolded.

August 21: Fans seek safety during gunfight outside Santos Modelo Stadium

The images broadcast from the industrial town of Torreon showed terrified men, women and children crouching under the stadium seats and scrambling for cover. Television Azteca, the second largest Mexican network, stopped transmission of the game. But ESPN continued, breaking its audience records worldwide for a domestic soccer match.

It was the first time drug-related violence had played out on live television alongside the country’s beloved national sport. But it also highlighted another battle, one raging inside the local Mexican media as criminal groups have continue to muzzle regional reporting on drug violence —  savagery that has left more than 60,000 dead since outgoing President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006.

Despite the stadium gun battle’s obvious news value, in the newsroom of the local daily El Siglo de Torreon, editors and reporters pondered whether to publish news of the shootout in a prominent place in the following day’s paper.  The attack had pitted the Zetas organised crime group against a municipal police contingent parked near the stadium.

“The pictures were provocative,” says the newspaper’s top editor Javier Garza. The staff worried they might become a target if they featured the images prominently. Assailants have bombed and sprayed the newspaper’s offices with bullets twice since 2009. Journalists receive death threats and warnings from criminal groups that don’t like El Siglo’s coverage.

Mexico was the most dangerous country to be a reporter in 2011, according to the International Press Institute. Ten journalists were killed here last year and the trend continues into 2012. A well-founded fear of retaliation from organised crime has deepened an atmosphere of self-censorship among Mexico’s regional news outlets.

In a six-month investigation, a follow-up to a study in 2010, Fundacion MEPI examined publishing trends in 14 of 31 Mexican states to better understand how drug violence affects news content in regional media. The states, concentrated in northern and central Mexico, are among the country’s most violent. The study found provincial newspapers increased their coverage of organised crime in 2011 by more than a 100 per cent over last year, publishing reports on 7 out of 10 organised-crime incidents in their coverage area. But only two newspapers — El Norte in Monterrey and El Informador in Guadalajara — were able to provide context to the violence, identify the victims and follow-up on crime stories.

The shootout did feature on El Siglo’s front page the day after the attack but in line with its editorial policies the paper did not explain why the gunfight happened. Editors know that criminals read their pages to see how their organisations are portrayed and are careful not to provoke them. El Siglo’s problems are the same as those faced by regional papers across Mexico.

The Theatrics of Violence

Sadly increased coverage of drug violence in 2011 was not a sign of the threat of violence against journalist waning. Rather it reflected the news media’s response to a spike in more gruesome violence including gangland-style executions, which sociologist Eduardo Guerrero estimated grew nine per cent countrywide and by more than 100 per cent in several municipalities.

“The murders in many parts of the country were spectacular in size and dimension,” adds Alejandro Hope, a former intelligence analyst with the Mexican civilian intelligence CISEN. During an interview with MEPI in Mexico City last month he says: “There was no way the local media could ignore  them.”

Some of high-profile 2011 incidents were: a fire set by Zeta operatives in the Casino Royale, a middle class gambling venue which killed 52 people; 35 nude bodies left on a main thoroughfare in in the southern state of Veracruz, and in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest city, 28 bodies stuffed into a parked SUV abandoned on a busy avenue.

Government Reports

Regional editors and reporters told MEPI that fear is not the only cause for spotty and weak news coverage.

A key factor is the limited flow of public information. In the stadium shootout case, local authorities failed to provide reporters with a proper police report, and according to El Siglo’s own safety protocols, reporters should not investigate such stories beyond the simplest official facts.

“It has been an uphill battle to try to get precise data from the local authorities,” Garza says. For instance, he noted, the prosecutors count homicides differently than the local police department. “Sometimes we get information from three government agencies, and they all contradict each other.”

Without this information from federal and local authorities, the regional news media cannot add context to their reporting, says Garza.

But there is yet another side of the story.

El Siglo’s patch, Torreon, is at the centre of a drug cartel turf war. Many other Mexican states face the same issues, their media are caught in the middle of cartel crossfire. In most of these states, the fear of retaliation combined with a lack of credible official information give rise to lopsided reporting dominated by coverage of beheadings, kidnappings and other criminal activities.

At El Siglo the coverage of government anti-crime efforts versus cartel-related crimes was  heavily tilted towards cartel crimes.  MEPI found 457 government operations described in the newspaper, far fewer than the 713 organised crime incidents El Siglo covered in 2011.

Ironically, the media in states controlled largely by one cartel tend to publish more stories about government anti-crime initiatives such police arrests and raids rather than the executions, kidnappings, home invasions, shootouts, attacks on police, government offices and personal that are the hallmarks of the cartels.

Forensic officers investigate murders of traffic police in Monterrey – 11/07/2012

In the Zeta controlled states of Tamaulipas, Michoacan and Zacatecas the media shied away from writing about drug organisations and their activities.

In Tamaulipas, which the MEPI study found suffered the highest rate of self-censorship, the newspaper El Mañana rarely covered organised crime violence. The few cartel stories it reported happened in Texas.

“In Tamaulipas the press is often co-opted,” says Carlos Flores, a security expert, and author of a book on the ties between local authorities and organised crime in Tamaulipas. Flores believes many journalists are concerned about cases of cartel spies infiltrating the newsrooms.

In Michoacan, another state where the study revealed organised crime reporting was limited, it is widely accepted that the cartel, La Familia, and its splinter group, the Knights Templars, are in control of criminal activities. Yet the newspaper monitored, La Voz de Michoacan, never mentions cartel names.

Not an Easy Fix

In some cities, official reporting has improved somewhat with the help of civil society and private sector initiatives. In both Ciudad Juarez and Monterrey, new private-public initiatives increased the flow of statistics. Alfredo Quijano, editor of the daily Norte, pointed to the creation two years ago of the Mesa de Seguridad, or Roundtable on Security, a civil society and government entity that gathers crime information and promotes public participation. And in Monterrey, the Consejo Civico de Instituciones de Nuevo Leon, or Civic Council of Institutions of Nuevo Leon, a private sector advocacy group that pushes for transparency in government affairs.

The lack of accountability and information flow goes back to Mexico’s history of a political system dominated by one party — Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) — Flores says.

For many years the authorities were not there to inform the public, but to release information that was useful to the government.

Getting the various government entities to release credible information will remain difficult, according to security experts familiar with government reporting in Mexico.

Local governments officials often do not have accurate intelligence about what is going on in their regions, says Leticia Ramirez de Alba, who coordinates studies on criminal trends for the non-governmental organisation Mexico Evalua.

Many often lack basic investigative skills while others are in collusion with organised crime, she says. In the last six years dozens of top government officials and police have been identified by Mexican intelligence as working for various organised crime groups. A recent case involved the arrest of 14 federal police officers who detained in connection with the attempted murder last August of two CIA contract officers and a Mexican Navy captain in a remote road near Mexico City. US officials suspect organised crime links, according to press accounts.

Meanwhile, statistics became an important measure of Mexico’s anti-crime programmes. In 2010, President Felipe Calderon, under pressure from human rights groups, released the first online database of organised crime-related homicides, dating back to 2006. For the first time there were official government numbers on the toll of rising drug-related violence. But the online database was criticised for lax sourcing. As the database was national, it also raised a legal question over whether the responsibility to investigate these murders lay with state-level, or federal authorities.

In 2011, the Attorney General’s office released another set of statistics, but it only covered homicides from January to September. It is unclear whether incoming President, Enrique Peña Nieto, of the PRI, which ruled the country for 70 years, will continue to provide statistics on crime.

Meantime, every state is ostensibly required to give the federal government credible figures on its crime trends. But local and state authorities have being caught manipulating the numbers to make their state look safe and appealing to voters. The practice is very common, according to Mexico Evalua.

According to El Siglo, in 2011, officials in Torreon faked crime figures, erasing more than 100 killings from the official docket. In 2007, the government of Mexico state, which borders Mexico City, also manipulated its numbers, reducing its violent homicide rate by 60 per cent, says Ramirez de Alba. The errors were made while President Elect Peña Nieto was governor of that state.

No Watchdog Journalism in Mexico

Marco Lara Klahr, a journalist and media trainer, has his own theory about why Mexican journalist shy away from digging deeper:

Journalists are not being trained to report on stories that go beyond the violence and which describe endemic problems with Mexican justice and political systems…As journalists, we are not doing our job of watchdog journalism.

In Torreon, El Siglo editor Garza says his editors and reporters understand there is a need to find better, safer ways to report on the drug war but for now they are doing the best they can.

In March 2011, 715 newspapers, radio and television stations attempted to improve crime coverage, signing an agreement to promote fair coverage. The final document included a statement obligating news media “to present information with exact context that explains the real problem of violence in the country.” The accord also required journalists to make sure “crime-news stories specify who provoked and carried out the violent act.” El Siglo signed up.

Garza says he knows the newspaper’s limitations and is searching for better ways to practice strong journalism while under constant threat. He is now encouraging his editors to build databases and use crime statistics in charts and maps that quantify the scope of the state’s problems.

He remains hopeful, saying: “We think it might be the way to avoid security threats in the future.”

Ana Arana And Daniela Guazo, Fundacion Mepi. Ana Arana is also Index’s Mexican correspondent

This report was based on research supported in part by Index on Censorship & the Doen Foundation

Read or download the report here or scroll through below (slow to load)

Report: Censored Media Mexico, 2011

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But nothing illustrated better how dangerous the situation was than a meeting with a group of reporters in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon last May. There was mistrust, fear and expectation. One reporter was paranoid when a colleague kept the list of participants in the meeting with him; another one asked a colleague not to take pictures of those present. And a third said he would be quizzed by local drug traffickers about his trip to Monterrey. Those from Monterrey listened carefully to what those in Matamoros and Ciudad Victoria, two cities on the US Mexico border, were saying. One of the reporters from Monterrey told me, “It looks like we could become like them.”

In May, we at the Fundacion MEPI de Periodismo de Investigacion, an independent investigative center based in Mexico City, were just beginning our probe into the media and violence “Mexico and the Spiral of Silence”, and were hoping to focus on the individual cases of threatened journalists. In July, the kidnapping of a group of journalists brought the story to a head. Because we were not ready to release our finding, we held back the report and decided to look deeper, the issue required more introspection. In the end we came out with a more targeted report that identified a few truths:

Traffickers have a clear public relations outlook and see the press and other forms of mass communication as an important part of their business.

The masters at this are the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel, two drug groups that started in the eastern states of Taumalipas, on the US/Mexico border and have controlled the local media with an iron hand. Their style is being copied by others like La Familia a cartel that operates in the state of Michoacan. The Zetas leadership is ex military and have implemented military techniques in the way they fight the government, but more importantly the way they engage the press.

With the split between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, their former enforcers, the hard-line style against the media has spread throughout Mexico creating virtual black news holes. While there are no good or bad drug cartels, some more established drug organisations like the Sinaloa Cartel have preferred to force the media to do what it wants through unwritten accords or a sort of détente. In Tijuana, the local cartel engaged early on in the high profile murders of several reporters, and a head on confrontation with the weekly Zeta, but as of lately this cartel has taken a lower profile approach, partly because of attacks by both Mexican and US police, but also because as a Tijuana journalist said, “they know we won’t back down.”

Today I understand the hesitation of reporters during the May meeting in Monterrey. There is widespread fear that the profession has been penetrated by the cartels. In some cases it is true, but in others is part of the new psy ops or psychological operations that the cartels have used to spread fear and mistrust amongst the press corps.

Click to see MEPI’s map of the impact of drug violence in news coverage

More details are listed in the report which can be found in Spanish in our website fundacionmepi.org , or a short story based on our study in the propublica.org website.

Ana Arana is Index on Censorship’s Mexico editor and director of the Fundación Mexicana de Periodismo de Investigación

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Mexico is the home of the telenovela. The genre in the 1940s. There are various storylines, but the most popular ones are the telenovela rosa, which always involves the story of a poor woman who falls in love with a rich man, and the evil woman who tries to stop the love from flourishing. When I first moved to Mexico, I spent the first year watching these telenovelas to see if they have anything to say about Mexican culture. They don’t.

Epigmenio Ibarra is the antithesis of a rosa producer. At the beginning he was seen as an anti-christ just for producing a different type of story. Television owners think that people want stories of chivalry and traditional values that put religion at the top of the heap, says Epigmenio, a medium built man with glasses who has a penchant for staring down at his interviewer. I met Epigmenio in Central America as he reported the news for the Mexican news agency Notimex. A clever man, he managed to find sources on both sides of that vicious civil war — he was loved by both army generals and guerrilla leaders. He remains close friends with former guerrilla leader Joaquin Villalobos who teaches at Cambridge.

Seventeen years ago, Epigmenio returned home after the Central American wars ended. He tried to continue reporting on the Gulf War and the Balkan wars, but it did not feel the same. He decided to take a stake in the now-changing Mexico, which was in the throes of moving from a one party system, run by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). He met his wife Veronica Velasco, a television reporter, and tried to get into the national television business. In Mexico there was only room for two news networks, Televisa, which is the second largest media conglomerate in Latin America after Consorcio Globo, and Television Azteca. “They closed the doors on us,” he recalls. “So we started doing telenovelas.”

Epigmenio and his wife started working with Azteca, as Veronica was a former television star who had worked with one of the chain’s channels. They did a series that investigated crime and justice, but they broke big when they produced political drama Nada Personal a thinly veiled critical look at the political soap surrounding former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. With Nada Personal, the socially conscious telenovela was born.

Since that first hit, Argos has produced a series of groundbreaking programmes that have taken on lesbianism, womanising priests, philandering politicians and strong women. The house’s most recent series, Capadocia — which it produced with HBO — deals with women in prison, and chapters are inserted with real life “hijuelos” or bastards, capturing real stories of drug trafficking, political corruption and social upheaval, which Argos introduces in the weekly or daily episodes, making the series uncannily close to real life.

“We are not interested in making a telenovela that features women who cry but still have perfect makeup. We look for a thinking viewer who does not want to be fed a story,” says Veronica Velasco, a tall, dark-haired striking woman.

Argos Comunicacion, the couple’s production company launched in 1992 — is today a sort of family business, with Epigmenio and Veronica at the helm, and other family members working in key positions, including one of Epigmenio’s daughters, Erendira, who played a lesbian in Las Aparicio. They have other business partners, including Mexico’s richest man Carlos Slim, who has invested in their production house. But the couple controls the content of Argo’s productions.

Epigmenio and Veronica recount the awards their series have obtained in the last 17 years, more out of awe at having conquered all odds than out of ego. “We won five awards in the recent International Festival of Telenovelas in Argentina,” adds Epigmenio, as we sit around a large square table in his spacious office. It is here in the Casa Azul — a turn of the century large mansion in Colonia Condesa — that he runs a production/talent scout and drama school conglomerate. Aware that many of the telenovela or Mexican starlets come out of the drama schools run by the two large television networks, he has also focused in trying to create more sophisticated and focused talent.

“It is the first time one telenovela has won all those awards in the festival in Argentina,” he continues. “We use the same writers TV Azteca uses, but they don’t win awards there,” tells Veronica. Cadena Tres was less of a struggle for Argos, which has had legendary falling outs with TV Azteca, its old outlet. Cadena Tres is a smaller media conglomerate. This new network is run by another Mexican millionare, Olegario Vasquez Raña, who owns hospitals and a newspaper.

Epigmenio continues to be involved in politics. He supported Andres Manuel Obrador the candidate on the leftist Partido Revolucionary Democratico (PRD), who ran for president in 2006 and lost to current president Felipe Calderon, amidst charges of vote fraud. On his twitter account, he writes anti-government messages. But one thing he learned being a war correspondent is that peace should be kept at all times. He says El Salvador’s biggest achievement was to reach peace after twelve years of war.

Argos’s latest plan are to produce a new soap called “The Weaker Sex”, a parody of a group of men who are abandoned by their wives and girlfriends. It is an old story in the United States and Europe. But this is a serious topic in a society that it is still dominated by the macho man and his virgin girlfriend telenovela that the other networks produce.

Still, Epigmenio and Veronica continue to be the outsiders who learned how to be insiders in Mexico. Their number one lesson from all the years producing telenovelas and series is: “You can’t touch the church and its values. We learned that when we tried to write about a womaniser priest. So we have figured out how to work out socially important stories without elaborating much on the church.”

Mexico is a very religious country, says Epigmenio. “We were told all priests were good when the Maciel scandal was at its height.” [Marcial Maciel, founder of the Legion of Christ, a conservative catholic sect, was exposed as a sex offender and has subsequently been formally denounced by the Vatican].

“We believe that the analysis commercial television uses to measure what Mexicans and Latin Americans want is wrong,” says Epigmenio “Lets not assume entertainment is something vacuous…television should also take risks,” he concludes.

Ana Arana is Index on Censorship’s Mexico editor and director of the Fundación Mexicana de Periodismo de Investigación

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The drug war continues to challenge the ways in which news and stories are disseminated in Mexico. While the newsmedia in many regions of this country work under the extreme censorship, organized crime has begun to taken it upon themselves to create news, by posting it on YouTube.

That was what happened last July when traffickers kidnapped four journalists and refused to release them until a local television channel aired a video that showed the director of the local prison worked with a competing drug gang. The video had been placed earlier on YouTube.

Today, Mexico´s media is abuzz because of yesterday morning´s release of a video in which a lawyer from Ciudad Juarez, Mario Angel Gonzalez Rodriguez, confesses that he and his sister, Patricia Gonzalez, the former state attorney general in the embattled state of Cihuahua (Ciudad Juarez), were on the payroll of the Cartel de Juarez. The video shows Rodriguez, who was kidnapped from his office a few days ago, surrounded by armed men in military garb and with face masks (a la Iraq). He claims the siblings ordered a number of high profile murders, including that of Armando Rodriguez, aka Choco, the journalist for the local daily El Diario de Juarez, murdered in 2008.

Meanwhile Patricia Gonzalez has responded by accusing the police of creating the video in revenge for her police corruption her investigations while she was in office.

Legal experts have asked the government to investigate the veracity of the accusations. Hector Gonzalez Mocken, of the National Confederation of Lawyers said the video is a police issue and that the former attorney general should be investigated, without assuming that the allegations are true.

Rather than clearing the air, the video raises many questions which can only cause more uncertainty in the embattled city of Ciudad Juarez (which today encompasses 20 per cent of all the gangland slayings in the country) and Mexico as a whole. Do the armed men belong to paramilitary groups? Do they work for the Cartel de Sinaloa, which is today challenging the Juarez Cartel for the territory of Ciudad Juarez? (This city stands next to one of the most profitable US —Mexico border crosspoints, with roads that connect it to both the eastern and western coasts in the United States.) Are the cartel henchmen that well equipped—AK 47s, military uniforms and boots? If so, it illustrates not just their cartels power but their increasingly militaristic ambitions.

The release of the video shows how important a free and safe media is to a society. In an upcoming report my organisation, The Fundacion Mexicana de Periodismo de Investigation (MEPI) reveals that local media in Ciudad Juarez is only airing two or three stories out of ten dealing with narco-related violence. This even include investigations. No newspaper in Ciudad Juarez could give itself the luxury of investigating the charges alleged in the video, even though they are incendiary.

Ana Arana is Index on Censorship’s Mexico editor and director of the Fundación Mexicana de Periodismo de Investigación

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The editorial sparked a diatribe from the Mexican government. Government spokesman Alejandro Poire attacked the newspaper for promoting illegal accords with organised crime.

To make matters worse for the El Diario, it was fooled on Monday by an impostor pretending to be Cesar Nava, the head of the ruling Partido de Accion Nacional (PAN), who said he supported negotiating an end to violence with organised crime.

In Mexico, as in most of Latin America, most of the attacks against journalists occur in provincial cities, where they often go unpunished. Regional media organisations are often small, because they are not as powerful as the national media they are attacked with impunity. There is often an underlying mistrust between these two types of media — the provincial news outlets pay lower salaries and their journalists get less training. In some cases journalists hold multiple jobs, which can pose conflicts of interest.

Until recently, the divide between the Mexican provincial press and the press in the Distrito Federal, as Mexico’s capital city is called, was huge. Attacks against journalists in Mexico have been common for more than 20 years ago, but they often occurred on border cities. Although the divide has narrowed recently — especially since the kidnapping of four journalists including a national Televisa cameraman last July — there is still a significant gap.

In recent interviews I have held with provincial editors, they say they still fee “abandoned” by their colleagues in Mexico City. “Some of our colleagues in [the city] feel we are giving in too quickly,” said one editor in Veracruz, “but the truth is they do not know the dangers we face.” Carlos Marin, of the national daily Milenio, scalded El Diario in a column yesterday, calling for the newspaper to close its doors, rather than capitulate before organised crime. Some Mexico City based editors are more willing to understand the plight of the provincial media. Denise Maerker, a columnist and Televisa presenter, said that El Diario de Juarez’s question to drug cartels last week was simply a public display of what is happening across Mexico. In her column in yesterday’s El Universal, she said that these pacts have been going on silently in the country. “Let’s not leave them alone”, she implored.

The issue underlying the entire debate over El Diario’s decision is the reality that more people in Mexico are questioning the drug war and are debating whether Mexico should negotiate with the drug cartels.

Ana Arana is Director of the Fundación Mexicana de Periodismo de Investigación

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The response to the attack, which ended with government forces rescuing some of the journalists, and others released by the drug gang, was firm and extensive. Dozens of columns and articles have been written by top journalists in the mainstream press, including journalists who in the past had argued that attacks against the press were no different than the attacks by drug gangs against judges and regular citizens. The murders of journalists as well as the onslaught that has been brought by the government fight against drug gangs, have largely unfolded in provincial cities, or near the US-Mexico border. The streets of Mexico City, except for isolated cases, have not been overtaken by acts of violence. As one journalist told me, “the murders have always affected local journalists who work for poor wages and with little protection.” The kidnapping was a wakeup call which has unleashed a number of proposals to protect journalists from attacks by organised crime.

Similar scenarios to that which unraveled in Durango State with the kidnapped journalists have shackled the local and provincial media for the last several years, creating cities where few journalists venture to cover news related to drug trafficking. At least 52 journalists and media workers have been killed in Mexico since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Of that number, CPJ acknowledges that 22 were killed because of their work. In the city of Nuevo Laredo, in the state of Tamaulipas, one reporter told me that the press are summoned to regular meetings with one of the local drug gangs, where they are told what stories related to drug trafficking they may cover. “We are not allowed to carry out our work as journalists.” Some of his colleagues mentioned that they only report on common crime, such as car accidents or domestic violence. “But everything is permeated by drug trafficking and one has to be careful not to reveal some information that is related to one of the drug groups,” said another young radio reporter from the same city.

Part of the problem with solving the murders of journalists is that Mexico is a federation, and under Mexican law there are crimes that fall under federal jurisdiction and others that fall under state (provinces) jurisdiction. Murder has always been a crime judged by local provincial judicial systems, which are often vulnerable to local organised crime. For a long time, press freedom groups have requested that the murders of journalists come under the jurisdiction of the federal system. Mexico has created a special unit that investigates attacks against the press. This unit works under the Attorney General’s office, and recently had its mandate extended to cover all forms of freedom of expression. However, the federal government still believes that the murders of journalists should be judged by local state authorities. What the kidnapping of the four journalists revealed is how infiltrated by organised crime local governments are. However, the special prosecutor’s office to investigate crimes against journalists continues to maintain that 80 per cent of the murders of journalists are common crimes and not related to the victim’s profession.

Ana Arana is Director of the Fundación Mexicana de Periodismo de Investigación

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