JESUS BLANCORNELAS, 70; WROTE EXPOSES ON TIJUANA DRUG CARTELS

MEXICO CITY -- Jesus Blancornelas, the pioneering border journalist
who braved assassination attempts and death threats to expose the
inner workings of Tijuana's murderous drug cartels, died Thursday of
natural causes. He was 70.

Suffering for months from the effects of stomach cancer, Blancornelas
died in a hospital in Tijuana, the city where his Zeta magazine,
founded in 1980, had earned him fame as "the spiritual godfather of
modern Mexican journalism."

In 1997, after daring to first publish the photograph of drug lord
Ramon Arellano Felix, Blancornelas escaped an assassination attempt
by cartel gunmen that left four bullets in his body. His bodyguard was killed.

"He never sold out, and he always stayed relevant," said Francisco
Bazan Penaloza, president of a Tijuana lawyers association.

"With his work, he raised high the name of Mexico in the world."

Blancornelas wrote about the drug cartels for decades, even as the
mafias intensified their war on muckraking journalists who dared to
report on their activities.

"Today there are cities where journalists work as if walking through
a minefield," Blancornelas said in a speech last May accepting his
second National Journalism Prize, Mexico's highest journalism honor.
"Other companions work every day watchful of tragedy.... We should
show our solidarity with them. They are going through hard times."

Born in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, Blancornelas
began his career as a sportswriter in the mid-1950s. He moved to
Tijuana in 1960.

His stories on the corruption of border officials forced him out of
three newspapers before he co-founded the weekly ABC in 1977. His
exposes riled Baja state officials so much that they sent police to
take over ABC's office in 1979 on the pretext of intervening in a
labor dispute.

Blancornelas fled to San Diego and unsuccessfully applied for
political asylum in the United States. In San Diego, he co-founded
Zeta with colleague Hector Felix Miranda in 1980. They distributed
the magazine across the border and eventually returned to Tijuana.

In 1985, a Zeta cover story on a warehouse filled with marijuana and
guarded by local police broke the story of the arrival of the
Arellano Felix brothers, who would become the leaders of the Tijuana
drug cartel.

Blancornelas would say later he did not realize the significance of
the story until plainclothes police officers bought all 20,000 copies
of the magazine off the streets in a clumsy effort to stifle the
news. Zeta republished the issue, with the headline "Censored!"
blaring on the cover.

Zeta exposed the collusion of local officials with the increasingly
powerful cartel and showed how local police protected the drug mafias.

Zeta co-founder Miranda was murdered while on his way to work in
1988. Two security guards at Tijuana's Caliente racetrack were later
convicted of the killings and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Since Miranda's killing, Zeta has published a full-page ad in every
edition asking the guards' employer, racetrack owner Jorge Hank Rhon,
why Miranda was killed. Hank Rhon, a frequent target in Miranda's
columns and now the city's mayor, has denied any involvement in the murder.

On Thursday, Hank Rhon told Tijuana reporters he would not mourn
Blancornelas' death. The city would hold no official ceremony to mark
his passing, he said.

In 1994, Zeta's investigation of the assassination of presidential
candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana arrived at a conclusion
almost as controversial as the magazine's exposes of the cartels:
Despite a swirl of conspiracy rumors surrounding the case, Zeta found
that the assassin, troubled factory worker Mario Aburto, had acted alone.

In the late 1990s, cartel hits of police and prosecutors in the city
became so common that Zeta would occasionally publish lists of the
dead with titles such as "the Organogram of Death."

Undeterred by the killing of more journalists, Blancornelas and Zeta
continued to publish stories, including one that detailed links
between the Tijuana cartel and the Mexican Mafia, a California
prison-based gang.

In November 1997, Blancornelas himself became a victim, when gunmen
opened fire on his car on a busy Tijuana street. His bodyguard Luis
Valero was killed.

"Thanks to God, my faithful friend Luis Valero, and the marvels of
medical science, I am alive," Blancornelas wrote in a column from his
hospital bed. Rather than allow the attack to silence him,
Blancornelas began a history of the Tijuana cartel that ran in installments.

"Everyone, even the narcotics traffickers, was waiting to see what I
would do," Blancornelas told The Times in a 2002 interview. "If I
retired, I was afraid the narcotics traffickers would feel free to do
the same thing to my colleagues."

In the years that followed, Blancornelas traveled in Tijuana with a
security detail worthy of a head of state. Having become a symbol of
journalistic tenacity and courage, he received numerous international
awards, including Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Prize and
awards from the Inter American Press Assn. and the Committee to
Protect Journalists.

The attacks against Zeta's staff continued. Co-editor Francisco Ortiz
Franco was killed in 2004 while driving in a car with his two young children.

In April, weakened by illness, Blancornelas retired from the magazine
he had founded.

He is survived by his wife, Genoveva Villalon de Blanco, and three sons.