MEXICAN JOURNALIST RUNS INTO TROUBLE ATTACKING BIG-TIME TARGET

MERIDA, Mexico (AP) -- His voice still booms when he denounces the
government, and he still favors the guayabera shirts he wore while reporting
on Central American guerrilla wars and during a decade of exile in Cuba.

The leftist insurgencies he made a career covering may be in decline, but
journalist Mario Menendez has never had trouble finding a cause. His
attitude is reflected in the name of his latest newspaper, the
40,000-circulation daily Por Esto! -- That's Why!

So at age 62, Menendez is locked in a battle with the director of Mexico's
largest bank, whom he accuses of forcing poor fishermen from their land on
the Caribbean coast to build a beach-front empire -- and, with little hard
evidence, of smuggling drugs.

It's the kind of David-and-Goliath struggle Menendez thrives on.

"I'm the only publisher in Mexico who has to walk around with a court
injunction in his shirt pocket," Menendez said, proudly displaying the
document that bars his arrest on libel charges filed by the banker.

Taking on the big boys, and championing the little guys, has long been
Menendez's passion.

After starting his career at his grandfather's Yucatan newspaper in 1958,
Menendez left to work for news magazines in the mid-1960s to report on a
story that few were covering at the time: the beginnings of guerrilla wars
in Guatemala, where landless Indians were rebelling against centuries of
oppression.

"We were on an official tour of Guatemala with the Mexican president. After
the tour, someone slipped us cards that said, `You've seen one side of
Guatemala, now you should see the other,"' he recalled.

Menendez was the only reporter who accepted the rebels' invitation. He spent
a month living with the incipient guerrilla movement -- whose fight grew
into a full-scale civil war -- and he still shows off the poignant pictures
he took of child rebels.

Menendez was expelled from Colombia a couple of years later for reporting on
leftist guerrillas there. Then, in the politically tumultuous times of 1968,
he founded a magazine that would land him in jail in Mexico-- Por Que? (Why?).

On Oct. 2 of that year, Menendez was standing on a balcony overlooking
Mexico City's Tlatelolco plaza when soldiers opened fire on student protesters.

Most Mexican newspapers, controlled or intimidated by the government,
quashed the story, and to this day, no one knows how many hundreds of
students were killed.

But Por Que? published graphic photos of the massacre, and printed stories
saying top government officials -- not the army -- had ordered the killings.
Memoirs of a former defense secretary published this past June appear to
support the magazine's contention.

The massacre fueled small leftist guerrilla movements in Mexico, and the
government became increasingly nervous.

By February 1970, Menendez was under arrest on charges of sedition and
thrown into a dreaded Mexico City jail known as "the Black Palace" along
with dozens of political prisoners. The government later destroyed his
printing presses and closed his magazine.

In November 1971, a group of leftist guerrillas kidnapped a Coca-Cola
distributor in the southern state of Guerrero. In return for the
businessman's release, they demanded the government free some political
prisoners, including Menendez.

Within days, Menendez was hustled onto a Mexican military plane and secretly
flown to Cuba. His passport was confiscated and he was told not to return to
Mexico.

For the next 10 years, he worked for the Cuban government news agency and as
a philosophy professor in Havana. Friends in Mexico finally won him
permission to return home in 1981.

Menendez laid low in the Yucatan provincial capital of Merida until his
father, also a journalist, told him it was time to start a newspaper. Por
Esto! was born in 1991, and it hasn't stopped punching.

In its fifth year, the newspaper began what has turned out to be its
fiercest crusade -- reporting on what Menendez contends is land-grabbing and
drug smuggling on Mexico's Caribbean coast by Roberto Hernandez, chief
executive officer of the Banamex banking company.

Bobby Settles, Hernandez's U.S. partner in a 22-mile beachfront empire, says
he and his partner are victims of a smear campaign. He says they bought up
the properties "to preserve the ecosystem down there."

Hernandez declined to be interviewed, but his lawsuit alleges Menendez has
made "baseless accusations ... exposing him to ridicule."

The story of Hernandez's Caribbean peninsula, and what it is used for,
involves some of Latin America's thorniest social issues: the power of money
and political influence, geographical remoteness and the powerlessness of
the poor.

When members of a fishing cooperative showed up at Menendez's paper to
complain that the banking magnate was trying to take their land, the editor
promised to help.

"I told them: `You have my word of honor. We won't back off this story,"'
Menendez said.

He sent reporters to the secluded coast -- reachable only by boat or
airplane -- where Hernandez and the fishermen were struggling over property
rights.

The reporters found packages of cocaine washed up on the banker's beaches,
alongside outboard motor-oil cans marked that they were made in Colombia,
which is the source of drugs moving via Mexico's Caribbean coast to the
United States.

Menendez had seen enough, and rushed to press with a story under the banner
headline: "Roberto Hernandez, Drug Trafficker."

The response was swift. A government-owned paper company cut off his supply
of newsprint, forcing him to import paper from the United States, and
Hernandez went to court.

In addition to the libel charge, Hernandez's lawyers asked the government to
revoke the newspaper's permit under a little-used law requiring Mexican
papers "to respect private life, public peace and morality." The Interior
Ministry eventually rejected the request.

Hernandez accused the fishermen of making up the story because they want
legal title to land they have traditionally used as fishing camps. His
lawyers said he uses the beachfront properties for sports fishing and has no
control over what the tide washes up on his beaches.

While Menendez appears to have little hard evidence to support the
allegations of drug smuggling by Hernandez, he seems to have touched a nerve
with the land-grabbing stories.

Hernandez has built the 22-mile stretch of beachfront properties on the most
isolated stretch of the Caribbean by buying out neighbors, or -- in the case
of the fishing cooperative -- forcing them out with lawsuits.

An American woman, who requested anonymity out of fear for what she called
"the Hernandez mafia," said she was pressured by Settles to sell a
beachfront property at a fraction of its worth.

In a telephone interview from her new home in the United States, she said
Settles suggested that if she didn't sell, she would face serious legal
trouble, possibly including drug-smuggling charges, which she said she
assumed meant that narcotics could be planted on her property. She sold in 1996.

Settles denied pressuring her. "We're the big boys on the block, and I'm
sure that we can be intimidating without ever trying to be," he said.

While reporting in Por Esto! on the court cases against him, Menendez is
taking the newspaper in new directions.

Por Esto! has begun sending reporters to Mayan Indian towns with names like
Dzidzantun, Tixkokob, Oxkutzcab and Totiz -- often the first time the
communities have had daily news coverage.

It's just more of the same, Menendez said: "Listening to what the little guy
has to say."