MEXICO 2ND ONLY TO IRAQ IN JOURNALIST SLAYINGS

Five evenings a week, Amado Ramirez fielded complaints from his radio
listeners on everything from corrupt public officials to the booming
drug trade in this famous resort city.

Then, on a Friday night, just blocks from a beach-side strip of bars
where thousands of tourists were partying, a gunman ambushed Ramirez
in his car as he attempted to leave his Radiorama office. Bleeding
profusely from bullet wounds in the chest, side and thigh, Ramirez
dragged himself several yards to a hotel to plead for help, according
to police and witness reports. Minutes later, he collapsed dead.

The murder April 6 came as a shock even in this city inured to
drug-related violence. Ramirez, 50, who also worked as a
correspondent for the Televisa TV network, was the most prominent of
the more than two dozen reporters and editors slain nationwide since
2000. To his frightened colleagues, his murder confirmed a chilling
fact: Mexico, in the grips of an escalating drug war, has become the
world's second-deadliest country for journalists after Iraq.

"Of course we're scared," said Ricardo Castillo, news director for
Acapulco's leading daily, El Sur. "He was the most visible of all of
us, and his murder was meant to send a message."

The killing was intended as a show of force by traffickers waging a
turf war for control of both the local market and the lucrative
smuggling routes to the United States, said Castillo.

"More than an effort to silence the media, it's part of a strategy to
instill terror," he said. "The assassination of a journalist isn't
just any killing. It touches the basic fibers of society."

The danger appears to be rising.

Statistics vary among watchdog groups, but they agree that Mexico has
surpassed Colombia, a country plagued by decades of guerrilla and
drug violence, in the number of journalists killed each year.

Seven Mexican journalists were slain last year, according to a count
by the Miami-based Inter American Press Association. The Paris-based
Reporters without Borders tallied nine killings, and the Federation
of Mexican Journalist Associations reported 11.

Three journalists were killed in Colombia last year, according to
Reporters without Borders. The group counted 65 journalists and media
assistants slain in Iraq over the past year.

A Bloody Warning

Many Mexican reporters, particularly in the embattled border states,
have stopped writing about organized crime, and, as the drug war
spreads south, journalists across the country are becoming targets.
On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, the decapitated body of a local
drug dealer turned up outside a newspaper in the eastern port city of Veracruz.

According to local press reports, the killers left this warning: "For
Milo, you'll all pay. You know it, and more heads of damned reporters
are going to roll." The threat was presumed to be directed at Milo
Vera, a local columnist.

"There's total impunity," said Jose Antonio Calcanio, president of
the Federation of Mexican Journalists Associations, which represents
137 journalist groups nationwide.

"The government has no interest in resolving any of these cases,"
Calcanio said. "It's only when there's a prominent case like Amado
Ramirez that they pretend to act, but then they forget, and nothing happens."

Two suspects were arrested in the days after the radio host's murder,
but both were released on bail.

Many of Ramirez's colleagues suspect the men were scapegoats.

In February 2006, amid pressure from international watchdog groups,
then-President Vicente Fox created a special prosecutor's office to
focus on crimes against journalists. The results have been slim,
critics say, in part because the office doesn't have jurisdiction
over organized crime cases. Those fall under the jurisdiction of
another office, the deputy attorney general's office for organized crime.

"They haven't been given the necessary teeth to do their job," said
Carlos Lauria, Americas director for the New York-based Committee to
Protect Journalists, who was active in pressuring for the creation of
the special prosecutor's office. Still, he blamed the country's
corrupt and inefficient judicial system for the lack of progress in
most of the cases.

The special prosecutor, Octavio Orellana, was not available for
comment. But he has defended his office in the past, saying its main
job is to prevent violence against journalists by investigating
threats before they become reality.

Nearly 1,000 people have died in gangland-style killings related to
drug-trafficking in the first four months of the year, compared with
2,000 in all of last year, according to Mexico City's El Universal
newspaper. The southwestern state of Guerrero, home to Acapulco, has
been one of the hardest hit, with some 300 gangland homicides last year.

The city made headlines worldwide after several heads were dumped
outside government offices last summer and another washed up on a beach.

Then came a series of armed raids on local police stations, including
one in which seven state officials died in February. After Ramirez's
murder, the U.S. State Department updated its travel advisory for
Mexico, for the first time warning of drug-gang violence in Acapulco.

Local authorities have tried to downplay Ramirez's murder. They say
Ramirez, married with two daughters, was probably killed in
connection with a lover's quarrel -- a theory that infuriates his colleagues.

They note that Ramirez, who reportedly received death threats a month
before he was killed, was not the only local journalist at risk. The
night of his murder, a security guard at his radio station reported
receiving a call with the threatening message: "We haven't finished.
We're going for one. Misa is next."

'Passion' May Have Limits

Misa is believed to be Misael Habana, Ramirez's outspoken co-host of
the nightly radio show. Both men frequently criticized the government
for failing to clean up the local police force, which is suspected of
links with traffickers.

A few days after Ramirez was killed, a previously unknown group
calling itself the Revolutionary Insurgency Brigades took
responsibility for the murder and said in an e-mail that another 25
journalists were "in the sights" of organized crime.

"Before, when we went out on a story, our editors told us, 'Good
luck.' Now they say, 'Be careful,' " said Eduardo Laredo, an Acapulco
radio reporter who took part in a May 3 march here to demand that
Ramirez's killers be brought to justice.

"Journalism is a passion," he said. "But there will come a time when
we'll have to choose between our passion and our lives."

[Sidebar]

Recent Attacks On Journalists

* Feb. 6, 2006: Gunmen storm the offices of El Manana in Nuevo
Laredo, wounding reporter Jaime Orozco. The paper stops detailed
reporting of the drug war. * Aug. 9, 2006: The body of Enrique Perea
Quintanilla, the founding editor of a monthly investigative journal
is found near Chihuahua City. Police blame organized crime.

* Nov. 21, 2006: Roberto Marcos Garcia, deputy editor of the weekly
Testimonio in Veracruz state, is shot dead on the street after
receiving death threats.

* Jan. 20, 2007: Rodolfo Rincon Taracena, an investigative journalist
in southern Tabasco state, disappears the day he publishes a story on
local trafficking.

* April 24, 2007: Saul Martinez Ortega, a reporter for Interdiario de
Agua Prieta, is kidnapped and killed while investigating the murder
of a policeman.

Sources: Reporters without Borders, the Committee to Protect
Journalists and news reports