ATTACK FOCUSES SPOTLIGHT ON CRUSADING TIJUANA PRESS

Media: Wounded Editor Is Part Of Small But Growing Cadre Who Pursue Drug
Cartels, Expose Corrupt Authorities.

TIJUANAJesus Blancornelas, one of Mexico's most respected journalists,
lies in a hushed intensive care unit, taking forced breaths from a
respirator, struggling to recover from the bullet wounds of a botched
assassination attempt by the Tijuana drug cartel. Outside, pokerfaced
security forces with semiautomatic weapons surround the hospital to prevent
drug gunmen from returning to finish off the job. And as Blancornelas
rests, the crusading young reporters of his Tijuana news weekly, Zeta, are
working feverishly to break precisely the kind of hardhitting stories that
nearly cost him his life. The city's small but growing corps of muckrakers
cover a dark drama that has brought them to the brink of the
mysteryshrouded assassination of a presidential candidate and immersed
them in a grungy, deadly drug story whose bloodspattering public
executions recall the gangland mob warfare of Chicago's Roaring '20s. In a
region where impunity and corruption have feathered a comfortable, if
bloody, nest for Mexico's most murderous drug lords, the relentless
coverage of these underpaid reporters puts them on intimate footingif not
a headon collision coursewith organized crime. And if the zeitgeist of
American journalism sometimes seems closer to "Hard Copy" than Watergate,
this emerging group of reporters recalls the oldfashioned journalistic
values and sense of urgency that once romanticized the profession. "It is a
sensitive job. With the lawlessness that exists here, we feel that anything
could happen," said Dora Elena Cortes, cowinner of Mexico's national
deadline reporting award for coverage of the 1994 assassination of
presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana. "In spite of the
risks, we are determined to continue working as we have been. We feel it is
our obligation not to be dissuaded by any fears we might have," said
Cortes, a Tijuana correspondent for a Mexico City newspaper. Journalists
plan a protest march Saturday to condemn the shooting of Blancornelas and
demand security. The threats against the media have become intimate and
closerange in this border region, where two journalists have been slain by
alleged drug gunmen since 1995. In July, an alleged drug gangster gunned
down a news weekly editor, Benjamin Flores, just across the Baja California
border in neighboring Sonora state, in the embattled town of San Luis Rio
Colorada, which has become a fiercely contested drug crossroads. Mexican
court documents allege that the trafficker hired assassins by telephone
from California. David Barron Corona, the gunman slain in the attack on
Blancornelas, grew up in San Diego and was believed to belong to the
Californiaprisonbased Mexican Mafia. He had already allegedly taken part
in the killing in 1995 of a young journalist, Dante Espartaco Cortez, who
possessed damning photos of cartel members, according to U.S. court
documents. Barron, whose rap sheet warns of a "vicious and predatory
nature," had strong personal reasons to resent Blancornelas. The editor had
named Barron the week before the attack as one of the gunmen who killed two
Baja soldiers. That Blancornelas, a dapper 61yearold intellectual, should
be one of the few people to survive the lethally efficient cartel death
squads has added to his legendand made the hypermacho cartel the butt of
numerous jokes. And it has shined a spotlight on the work of a cadre of
border reporters who have broken with a still widely entrenched tradition
of press corruption and are going after corrupt local authorities who use
money or intimidation to silence the media. "These young journalists are
going to go far," said Jose Luis Perez Canchola, one of the most respected
Baja human rights figures. "They are aggressive. They take risks. They want
to legitimize their profession. "They are not attacking just to attack, but
to reveal the truth," he said. "The press has changed a lot, and a lot of
this is due to this new generation of reporters. This group that we are
seeing grow here in Tijuana is a true exception to provincial Mexican
journalism. It is very good for the state." As in Mexico City, where a
tradition of aggressive journalism has grown in the past decade, the
phenomenon is relatively recent in Baja California. Twenty years ago,
Blancornelas was forced into exile in San Diego for two years because of
what he was publishing about authorities. Observers link the shift to the
ascendance of the opposition political movement that culminated in 1989
with the election as Baja California governor of liberalminded Ernesto
Ruffo Appel of the National Action Party. Still, press corruption remains
rife in Tijuana. Authorities regularly pay off many journalists, a practice
common in Mexico. Local dailies generally adhere to welldefined political
or personal power bases. In the 1994 national elections, opposition
candidates in Tijuana were irate that some local reporters demanded payment
of up to $150 to publish their interviews. The best young journalists often
become local correspondents for Mexico City newspapers. Even then, their
presence provokes internal power struggles between the old guard of local
newspapers and young reporters eager to join the ranks of competitive,
"clean" journalists. There are still invisible but wellknown boundaries
that operate much like the Tijuana "law of the Mafia." Most risky is
reporting personal details on Tijuana drug cartel memberstheir addresses,
the names of their wives and children, or the names of their gunmen, who
have emerged from some of Tijuana's most prominent families. In the days
before the attack on Blancornelas, in its characteristic takenoprisoners
style, Zeta reported that CHan alias of gunman Barronhad been involved
in the killing, in broad daylight in downtown Tijuana, of two soldiers said
to have played a role in the recent arrest of a cartel lieutenant, Arturo
Paez Martinez. On Nov. 27, Barron taped his trigger finger and donned a
longsleeved shirt in black, the customary color of choice for Tijuana
assassins. He and nine other gunmen are said to have piled into two
carsboth from San Diego, one of them stolenand intercepted
Blancornelas' vehicle as he was being driven to work. Blancornelas'
bodyguard, Luis Lauro Valero, was killed before he was able to fire back.
And as he crouched at the street corner with his assault rifle, Barron too
was killed, by the frenzied crossfire of his own fellow gunmen. They fled,
abandoning his body and later the cars, leaving behind a sloppy trail of
clues that made it easy to trace the crime to the cartel. But the fact that
state authorities had retired two police bodyguards assigned to
Blancornelas, just three weeks before, also shined some unwelcome light on
officials. In its blistering next issuewhich hit the streets a day after
the shootingZeta demanded to know who gave the order to remove the
police, and suggested that there might have been "an agreement between drug
police and drug officials to open the path for the hit men." The top state
prosecutor promptly resigned.

Copyright Los Angeles Times