LATIN JOURNALISTS FINDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH DEADLY

Reporters the target of violence as stories focus on drug traders

SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO, Mexico Edith Camacho ignores the pleas of her
family to quit her receptionist's job when she goes to work each day at La
Prensa, an embattled newspaper anchored on a dirt side street of this
roughedged border town.

One afternoon in July, Camacho, 19, was seated at her desk inside the
newspaper's offices, when gunmen shot and killed her boss, owner and
publisher Benjamin Flores, on the building's front doorstep. The staff of
La Prensa blames local drug traffickers for the killing.

In the months following Flores' murder, Camacho has stayed at her job
despite a barrage of threats against the newspaper's employees.

"They thought that by killing Benjamin, they were going to kill the
newspaper," Camacho said recently. "But it's not happening. We continue on.
And if they kill another of us, we'll continue. And another and another."

Camacho's resolve apparently is shared by her colleagues at La Prensa, a
3,500circulation tabloid produced in a small house on the southern edge of
San Luis, about a threehours' drive east of San Diego.

Despite continuing death threats, none of the eight young reporters or the
dozen or so members of the business staff has quit. The newspaper continues
to run hardhitting stories about local drug traffickers and government
officials.

"These are people who are not going to be bought off," said Imanol
Caneyada, a 29yearold La Prensa reporter. "When a journalist dies, it's a
blow to society. It means anybody has the right to shut up anyone with
bullets."

Mexican journalists, especially those along the border with the United
States, face a growing risk of violence spun by the political and economic
influence of the drug trade.

Like their colleagues in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America, Mexican
journalists willing to expose or criticize local gangsters and their allies
within government have become targets of violence, shock absorbers in their
society's confrontation with the narcotics underworld.

Journalists have long been at risk in Latin America, a region known for
creaky justice systems and a tentative hold on democratic government. But
since the early 1980s, the threat to the press has increased along with the
rise of the cocaine trade.

In recent years, U.S. law enforcement officials say, control of cocaine
trafficking has been shifting out of Colombia into Mexico and other
countries.

"In the past, nearly all assaults on journalists were linked to corruption
of public officials," said the InterAmerican Press Association in a study
published this year on violence against Mexican journalists. "More
recently, drug trafficking also has been deeply involved."

Across Latin America, at least 170 journalists have been murdered in the
past nine years, according to IAPA.

More than 20 of those men and women have died in Mexico, which trails only
Colombia in terms of the number of journalists slain in the hemisphere.
Nearly 70 Colombian journalists have been murdered since the late 1980s.

This year, three journalists have been murdered in Mexico for what they
have written, and three others have been slain in Colombia, according to
the New Yorkbased Committee to Protect Journalists.

Dozens of journalists in Mexico and Colombia have been kidnapped, assaulted
or intimidated because of their profession in recent years. Five reporters
in Mexico City were beaten in September in what analysts say were attempts
to scare them off crime stories.

"Although we don't want to admit it, Mexico is becoming Colombianized,"
said Tijuana lawyer Manuel Julia Beltran, using a term coined to describe
the violence and corruption plaguing countries that produce or trade in
narcotics.

Julia, who runs a bookstore specializing in legal publications, said he
once made a small fortune representing drug traffickers, but quit that line
of work a decade ago when the narcotics trade became so violent. Several
Tijuana lawyers have been murdered by drug gangs in recent years.

The bookstore owner shook his head as about a hundred people marched past
his shop in an upscale Tijuana neighborhood to protest last month's
shooting of newspaper publisher Jesus Blancornelas.

"Society is in danger," Julia said.

Authorities suspect that Tijuana's cocainesmuggling cartel is responsible
for the Nov. 27 attempted assassination of Blancornelas. Killed in the
attack were the publisher's bodyguard and one of the assailants.
Blancornelas, who was shot four times, was released from a Tijuana hospital
Wednesday.

The publisher's weekly newspaper, Zeta, has earned a reputation for
exposing the tentacles of the drug trade in Tijuana and the rest of Baja
California state.

Recognizing the increased risks faced by members of the Mexican media, the
Committee to Protect Journalists sponsored a workshop in early November to
explore ways in which reporters and editors can protect themselves.
Blancornelas was one of the featured speakers.

"The first line of defense is good journalism," said Joel Simon, the
committee's coordinator for Latin America. "But shoddy journalism doesn't
justify execution."

Though some Mexican journalists have clearly lost their lives because of
gangster retaliation for stories, the motives behind other murders have
remained murky. Many poorly paid Mexican journalists, especially those at
small publications in the countryside, have been accused of blackmail and
other illicit activities.

But in Colombia, most journalists killed in recent decades had run afoul of
drug smugglers, leftist guerrillas or rightwing henchmen.

"It's very difficult to protect journalists," said Luis Gabriel Cano, the
publisher of the Colombian newspaper El Espectador, who recently stepped
down as president of IAPA. "The journalist works under constant threats."

Cano is all too familiar with the risks. He assumed control of El
Espectador in 1986 after his brother, Guillermo, the publisher, was
assassinated in front of the newspaper's offices by gunmen believed to have
been sent by powerful cocaine smuggler Pablo Escobar.

Escobar was incensed by the hardline position that the newspaper had taken
toward the drug trade, Cano said. Escobar, who was killed by police four
years ago, was suspected in the 1989 bombing of El Espectador's offices.

Since his brother was killed, 11 employees of the Bogota newspaper have
been murdered, Cano said.

"The journalist in Colombia, as in other parts of the region, has always
worked under threats against himself and his family," he said. "It's very
difficult to work with absolute freedom."

Colombian journalists killed this year include Gerardo Bedoya, an editorial
writer for El Pais, the largest newspaper in Cali, who had repeatedly
called for the extradition of the country's most powerful drug traffickers.

This month, leftist guerrillas who wanted to send a "peace message" to the
Colombian government kidnapped a spokesman for President Ernesto Samper and
a radio journalist. The two were released to the Red Cross last week.

The travails of Colombian journalists have mirrored those of their society
in general. Billions of dollars from the cocaine trade have fed a spiral of
bloodshed in the South American country over the past two decades,
providing funding to leftist guerrillas waging civil war in the
countryside, fomenting gang violence in the cities and encouraging
government corruption.

In contrast, much of Mexican society, at least in urban centers where most
people live, has been spared the bloodiest effects of the narcotics trade.
Drugrelated bloodshed remains largely limited to feuds between trafficking
gangs or to the assassinations of police officers, prosecutors and judges
suspected of dealings with smugglers.

Still, at least some Mexican journalists have been targeted by the
narcotics underworld.

Perhaps nowhere have the risks been greater than along the U.S. border,
where powerful smuggling organizations have held sway for years and
disputes seem to end in shootings as often as in shouting.

"The north of Mexico is a very dangerous place for journalists," said Jesus
Barraza, the 32yearold managing editor of La Prensa. "(But) if we have to
talk of (the drug trade), we talk about it. If we have to speak about
government corruption, we do."

Flores, who was 29 when he died, founded La Prensa five years ago after
finding local journalism wanting, Barraza said. Like many smalltown
publishers in Mexico, the strong willed Flores used his newspaper as a
battering ram against all he saw as wrong with San Luis Rio Colorado.

The town, across the border from Yuma. Ariz., is a raw, raucous place. The
population has more than doubled to 200,000 people in the past decade.
Almost everyone, it seems, is from somewhere else.

Newcomers arrive daily from the Mexican interior, hoping to find work in
the foreignowned factories called maquiladoras that have sprung up in
town, to slip across the border to work the irrigated fields near Yuma or
to make their way to Los Angeles.

Anchored at the top of the Gulf of California, a favorite smuggling route
for decades, the city served as an early center of Mexico's narcotics
trade. First marijuana and heroin, then cocaine and methamphetamines were
smuggled by the truckload across the border.

U.S. law enforcement officials consider the smugglers who rose to
prominence here in the 1960s as role models for the huge
cocainetrafficking organizations that now hold sway in Tijuana, Ciudad
Juarez, Matamoros and other Mexican border cities.

San Luis' long relationship with the narcotics industry has helped produce
an estimated 8,000 heroin addicts, an astounding number for a city its
size. Police and journalists blame the addicts for the city's plague of
theft and petty crime.

"It's a big social problem here," Barraza said. "What happens if the kids
are using heroin and don't have money? They rob, they assault."

>From the start, La Prensa's style was aggressive: long on accusations of
local corruption and wrongdoing, sometimes short on proof and balance. The
title of Flores' regular column, "Unconfirmed," may best illustrate his
reporting philosophy.

"Many times we turn into a protagonist more than a witness, pushing
things," Caneyada said of the journalists at La Prensa. "But we are
participants in a changing society, and making errors is worthwhile."

Flores' troubles with local gangsters began in 1993 soon after he started
his newspaper, when he began writing about members of a local family widely
suspected of trafficking narcotics. That same year, he filed a formal
complaint accusing one member of the family of threatening to kill him.

Authorities did not pursue the complaint, Barraza said.

"There are people in the government who are interested that journalists are
annihilated," he said.

Police arrested several men soon after Flores' murder, accusing them of the
crime. But La Prensa's staff insists that the real killers remain free. The
newspaper publishes a complaint to authorities daily in the space where
Flores' column once appeared, demanding that the murder case be solved.

Perhaps because of the sensational style of some Mexican publications and
the unsavory reputations of some journalists, many people seem to shrug at
the dangers that reporters face.

At a rally held in San Luis last summer to protest Flores' murder, only a
few hundred people showed up, Caneyada said. Most of those who attended
were family or friends of the slain journalist.

"The lack of solidarity is amazing," the reporter said. "If no one
complains, it is going to be very easy to kill journalists."

Earlier this month in Tijuana, only about 100 people almost all of them
journalists took part in a march to protest the shooting of newspaper
publisher Blancornelas, even though the rally had been advertised on
television and in newspapers,

Motorcycle police blocked downtown traffic as the marchers weaved their way
past state and federal offices toward a monument to freedom of speech.
People emerged from shops and restaurants to watch the demonstrators pass.
Motorists shot irritated frowns at the protesters, but none honked horns or
gave other indications of support.

"People know the system, and they know the government is not going to do
anything," said Julia, the bookstore owner. "So we don't have much support
for this sort of thing."

A similar protest march following the 1988 killing of Hector Felix Miranda,
Blancornelas' founding partner at Zeta, drew 4,000 protesters. Two security
men employed by Jorge Hank Rhon, a member of one of Mexico's leading
political families, were convicted of the murder.

In San Luis, the shooting of Blancornelas has renewed old fears for Barraza
and his staff at La Prensa.

"It's difficult to work, thinking that just around the corner there is
someone who wants to shoot you," Barraza said. "It changes your work. It
changes your life. You live your life in fear."

For now, however, the greatest challenge facing Barraza and his team of
young reporters is to keep La Prensa going. When Flores died, he left the
newspaper in debt, Barraza said.

But advertising and subscriptions continue to grow, Barraza added. La
Prensa staff members, most of whom earn only about $100 a week, are
determined to keep the tabloid independent and vital, he said.

"We are going to be an influential and prosperous newspaper," said Barraza,
sitting behind the desk that Flores once occupied. "I am sure of it."

Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle Mexico City Bureau