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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Italian journalists face in serious difficulties investigating organised crime and links with business. Cecilia Anesi reports from a conference highlighting the issue

 Global organised crime and global finance are much more closely linked than we think, and those who try to investigate their relationship often find themselves met with a wall of silence.

This issue was recently addressed at the Otranto Legality Experience (OLE), an international event in its second year, which took place in Puglia, southern Italy. The event addressed the relationship between organised crime and globalisation, with a specific focus on global finance and the way the criminal organisations penetrate it, looking at issues such as money laundering and corruption.

The event was coordinated by FLARE, a network of civil society organisations committed to social struggle against organised crime, and was attended by over  200 young people from across the world. It is the transnationality of the organised crime, the hinge of OLE, with the awareness that the only way to defeat such criminality is the very same international spirit.

Organised crime is increasingly permeating global finance, and is ever-changing in its shape and style. It has begun to play a crucial role, offering the legal market the chance to exploit a competitive — and criminal —economic system. The dangers and the difficulties encountered by journalists or researchers when trying to investigate this topic are huge, as explained at OLE by John Christensen, director of Tax Justice Network International, and by Roman Shleynov, investigative journalist with the Russian magazine Vedomosti.

Christensen believes the criminal financial system is based on corruption, which has become an endemic problem of our society, deeply rooted in our culture, something that today we take for granted. “Tax evasion made by corporations happens at an industrial level, and it costs the poorest countries of the world 160 billion dollars per year. But while the Western world has the courage to point the finger at African countries as corrupt countries, but we are never heard saying the same about white lawyers. Nevertheless we do know that London is the world’s largest off-shore haven, responsible for having exported such a system in the whole world.” Christensen believes we should look at corruption in a new way, considering not only the demand side, but also the supply side.

Moreover, he maintains corruption is also particularly hard to fight because those who try to uncover it face a wall of silence.

“I have been working for many years together with investigative journalists and I can tell you that every time they have tried to investigate who is behind certain businesses, or where the money goes, they inevitably crashed against a wall of silence made of shell companies, of unreachable off-shore companies.

And I think that silence means censorship: in the moment in which you cannot penetrate the secrecy wall you understand that secrecy is against the very ideal of freedom of speech. And we have plenty of governments in the world who do praise freedom of speech but then, at the same time, protect criminal activity.”

Russia is another suitable example of a country where it is difficult to track financial flows. Roman Shleynov knows it well, having conducted a number of investigations both for Vedomosti and  newspaper Novaya Gazeta.

“In Russia,” he explains “the standard way of doing business is through informal agreements between parts. For example, a person might open a company and then pass it on to somebody else, and what links the two persons is an informal agreement. Often documents are not complete, and in some cases they are completely missing. There is a wide use of shell companies and off-shore companies that are opened in tax heavens such as Switzerland or Luxembourg, which means it is impossible for us journalists to find out about them unless law enforcement in Russia uncovers some tracks. Businessmen who use off-shore realms are not necessarily criminals; it might also happen that they want to hide their assets from the state, because state officials can be dangerous for them.”

“Concerning the presence of organised crime in Russia — financially speaking — we can see how it is closely connected to the state officials. This means in most cases the committed crimes are not officially investigated and recognised as crime, and journalists can only cover the links between actors, or unclear situations but cannot reconstruct the whole process of the criminal activity.” Corruption is thus a widespread phenomenon.

Shleynov adds, “the result is that often it becomes possible to predict the winner of a tender, because there is a tendency of non-transparency which allows businessmen to make business as they like, without respecting the rules of the licit market, because they feel public opinion means nothing compared to the political one.”

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Boris “Bobi” Tsankov, 30, was shot in the back at midday Tuesday as he was entering a building in a busy part of Sofia. Two men accompanying Tsankov were also critically wounded. The gunmen escaped on foot. “Crime boss” Krasimir Marinov was arrested the same day and charged on Thursday with incitement to murder. Police are still searching for Marinov’s younger brother Nikolai in connection with the case.

Tsankov’s book, “The Secrets of the Mobsters” was published last November. Its contents were sourced from Tsankov’s friends and contacts in the underworld, including figures like drugs boss Anton Miltenov, who was himself shot dead four years ago.

Tsankov, however, was known less for crusading journalism than he was for his own dodgy dealings, said a senior analyst at a Sofia think tank. “He was famous for frauds in radio and TV games, and was the director of a radio station owned by a drug boss,” said Tihomir Bezlov, an analyst with the Centre for the Study of Democracy, referring to Tsankov’s business partnership with the drugs boss Miltenov, and the more than 100 complaints filed against Tsankov by Bulgarians who allegedly lost money through Tzankov’s con games which involved contests and advertising. In 2006, Tzankov received a three-year suspended sentence for taking €26,000 from a local businesswoman for advertisements that never aired.

Nor is Tsankov’s book renowned for its veracity. Top police official Valeri Yordanov told Bulgarian television this week that the book is a mix of fact and fiction, and that Tsankov actually knew less than half the mobsters he’d claimed to have met. Bezlov agreed, claiming the book includes many fictional stories mostly involving dead crime bosses.

These pieces of fiction may have cost Tsankov his life argued a Sofia-based journalist, noting that someone who pretends to have access to mobsters and chronicles false tales is likely to have a long list of enemies. But it’s also entirely possible that the murder had nothing to do with anything Tsankov wrote. “Before that he stole a lot of money from other people, so there were more than enough people who wanted him dead,” said Stanimir Vaglenov, an investigative journalist with the Sofia newspaper 24 Hours.

It wouldn’t be the first time a Bulgarian media figure was attacked for reasons outside journalism, Vaglenov said. In 2008, the editor of online outlet FrogNews, Ognjan Stefanov, was brutally beaten by unknown assailants. “Ognjan was and still is a journalist, but at the same time is a business partner of a rich man [allegedly] connected with criminals,” Vaglenov said. “So he was beaten not because of journalism, but as a soldier in the war between his business partner and his enemies.”

Another writer with dubious connections, a former wrestler named Georgi Stoev who’d written nine books about the Bulgarian underworld, was shot dead on a busy Sofia street in April 2008. The same month, Bulgaria’s interior minister resigned amid a scandal that appeared to link organised crime figures to the country’s top police officials. While both incidents seemed to cement Bulgaria’s reputation as the most crime-ridden country in the 27-nation European Union, reports of fraud, conflict of interest and an organised criminal group siphoning off millions in EU aid proved to be the final straw for the Union. Its executive arm, the European commission froze more than €500m in aid to Bulgaria in July 2008.

In July 2009 Bulgarian voters replaced the ruling Socialists with a conservative government that pledged to crack down on organised crime and corrupt officials. The new government has made inroads against such ills — charging senior members of the former Socialist government with embezzlement and corrupt deals, and arresting more than 20 alleged members of kidnapping gangs last month. The progress prompted the EU to unfreeze more than €100m in farm aid to Bulgaria in September.

But the Tsankov murder shows that the government has a long way to go to stem organised crime. The situation today may not be as violent as the spate of shootings that marked the run-up to Bulgaria joining the EU in 2007 — when criminal bosses moving into legitimate businesses moved to eliminate their rivals — but this time the EU is watching closely. EU spokesman Mark Gray condemned the murder Tuesday, he said. “Any shooting is unacceptable and we hope that Bulgarian authorities will bring those that have perpetrated this act to justice as quickly as possible.”

Beth Kampschror, a former Balkans correspondent, writes for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project

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