PRESS CLIPS

He's the Voice of the Mexican People

MARIO MENENDEZ VS. THE DRUG WAR

In Mexico, untouchables are people who are protected by the power they
wield. Two such men are Sam Dillon, who runs The New York Times's bureau in
Mexico City, and Roberto Hernandez, who owns Banco Nacional de Mexico
(Banamex), the country's biggest bank. But this is the story of another
untouchable: Mario Menendez, the 63-year-old editor and publisher of Por
Esto!, a newspaper chain that might be called the Village Voice of the
Yucatan Peninsula.

Menendez's only weapon is calling it as he sees it: He believes, for
example, that Hernandez is a "narcotics trafficker," Dillon is in the
pocket of government officials, and U.S. "authorities" are managing the
illegal drug trade in Mexico. He advocates legalization as the only
solution to the drug war. Yet his papers flourish in a country best known
for repression, and in March, he will travel to the U.S. at the invitation
of Columbia Law School. His friends fear that by speaking his mind, he is
risking his life.

When Menendez launched Por Esto! in Merida in 1991, he says, his aim was to
start a newspaper "that was open to all beliefs. The only condition I
insisted on was to tell the truth. It was very radical." El Diario de
Yucatan, the paper of record, still displays the conservative, Catholic
outlook that has dominated the region for years.

Por Esto! is a daily tabloid, designed a bit like USA Today with lots of
short articles and color photos. The three-paper franchise is privately
owned and boasts a paid circulation of 46,000 in the Yucatan state, 21,000
in Quintana Roo, and 4000 in Campeche. Some critics say Menendez's
one-sided and anti-establishment tone hurts his credibility, but then
again, he publishes a variety of viewpoints and rare coverage of rural
areas such as the Mayan villages of Chiapas.

Menendez says, "I'm the only editor in chief of any paper in southeastern
Mexico who does not own a yacht, an airplane, and several houses." Every
two weeks he stages public assemblies in small towns, where thousands flock
to complain about their papers and politicians. Por Esto! then publishes
full transcripts, asserting what Menendez calls "the voice of the people
who do not have a voice in civil society."

Al Giordano, a former political reporter for The Boston Phoenix who now
writes about Mexico, calls Menendez's writing style "hyperbolic" yet
"irresistible." "It's a very personal kind of class warfare . . . against
the historically powerful of the region."

Allen Wells, an expert on Latin American history at Bowdoin College, says,
"To be an advocacy journalist in Mexico is not a growth industry. For a
gadfly like Menendez to survive in that kind of climate, he must have his
own powerful friends as well--because you don't print the kind of stuff
that he does for long and survive."

But Menendez seems fated to be a recording angel. In October 1968, after he
and Oriana Fallaci saw student protesters gunned down in Mexico City, he
published photos and reports of the massacre in Por Que?, his now defunct
magazine. In response, the Mexican police closed the magazine and threw him
in jail. Upon his release, he was exiled to Cuba for 10 years.

Cut to December 16, 1996, the day Por Esto! published the first in a long
series denouncing Roberto Hernandez as a "narco-trafficker." After Menendez
got a complaint from a fishing collective whose members felt they were
victims of a land grab by Hernandez, Por Esto! reporters found packages of
cocaine washed up on the banker's beaches.

Hernandez is a former stockbroker who won Banamex at auction when it was
privatized in 1991. In the last election cycle, he held a million-dollar
fundraiser for the dominant political party, the PRI, and his company is
now worth $2.5 billion. One thing he has done with his money is to scoop up
property on the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo, turning assorted pockets
of environmental paradise into luxury hotels. As the Times has reported,
the so-called Mexican Riviera is a convenient transfer point for the
Colombia-to-U.S. drug trade.

But that doesn't make Hernandez a drug trafficker. In 1997, even as Por
Esto! filed criminal complaints against Hernandez for drug trafficking and
other counts, Hernandez asked the government to file a criminal libel
action against Menendez. (In Mexico, such actions are regularly used to
silence journalists.) Por Esto! continued to investigate, and the
allegations reached Sam Dillon in September 1998, when he traveled to the
Yucatan to pursue alleged ties between Mario Villanueva, then governor of
Quintana Roo, and the ever present drug trade.

Dillon recalls talking to Por Esto! reporters. "We gave him the material
and said go verify it for yourself," reports Menendez. But Dillon was too
busy to pursue the story. According to one source, "He talked to the sister
of Roberto Hernandez, a member of the divine caste of Merida, but couldn't
find the time to talk to the fishermen."

Dillon was unmoved. "As far as I could determine," he says, "the only
evidence Por Esto! had for their claims was that people were landing
cocaine along [Hernandez's] properties along the coast of Quintana Roo.
That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Cocaine lands all along that
coastline, and no one suggests that the people who own those beaches are
running the drug.

"You rarely encounter an allegation about someone's involvement in the drug
trade in Mexico that doesn't have some political vendetta behind it,"
Dillon continues. And indeed, everyone seems to agree that Hernandez and
Villanueva had some kind of . . . business dispute. Aside from the sources,
the Hernandez allegations sound eerily similar to the Villanueva
allegations reported in an A-1 Times story by Dillon and Tim Golden on
November 26, 1998.

One of the Times's sources was a senior Mexican official, who declared the
odds better than even that Villanueva would be indicted after his term
ended in April 1999, under the suspicion that his state police were
involved in the drug trade. Sure enough, on March 28, Villanueva went on
the lam, shortly before a warrant was issued for his arrest. He called the
charges politically motivated, telling the Mexican magazine Proceso,
"Behind this smear campaign . . . I see the hand of Roberto Hernandez."

One big difference between the Hernandez and Villanueva accusations is that
the latter were backed up by authorities. As Dillon points out, "One of the
problems in covering the drug trade . . . is that the intelligence agencies
of the U.S. and Mexican governments have a near monopoly on reliable
information." He calls Por Esto!'s allegations "so silly that no one's ever
paid any attention to them." Indeed, Dillon found it unremarkable that when
President Clinton met his Mexican counterpart last year, the setting was
Merida's Hacienda Temozon, a fancy hotel owned by Hernandez.

And yet, the Hernandez controversy burns on. Al Giordano reported on it in
the Phoenix last May, and in September 1999, the Associated Press's Mark
Stevenson published his investigation, calling the drug charges
inconclusive but finding convincing evidence that Hernandez was a land
grabber. Two days later, on September 6, a Mexican judge threw out
Hernandez's libel suit because, according to the judge's order, "all the
accusations formed by [Menendez] were based on facts." Hernandez did not
return calls for comment.

"Every newspaper kept silent about the October 1968 massacre," says
Menendez. "That doesn't mean it didn't happen." The publisher's trip to the
U.S. coincides with Congress's annual March debate over Mexico's progress
in the drug war, and drug czar Barry McCaffrey's visit to Mexico earlier
this month. The drug czar also has corruption on his mind, according to a
news brief filed by Dillon on February 11. Noting that Mexican officials
had "documented a $60 million bribe from the drug lords," McCaffrey said,
"That's getting close to my price."