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

The post Mexico’s regional press falls silent appeared first on Index on Censorship.

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

The post Mexico’s narcomedia takes over appeared first on Index on Censorship.

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

The post Drug cartels divide the Mexican press appeared first on Index on Censorship.