Source: Houston Chronicle, page 31A
(http://www.chron.com/cgibin/auth/story/content/chronicle/
world/97/09/07/mexicopresswrap.31.html)
Contact: viewpoints@chron.com

Mexico's Zedillo pledges that he'll pursue inquiry into
journalists' deaths

By ANDREW DOWNIE

MEXICO CITY Over the past nine years, 21 Mexican journalists
have been killed, and countless others have been kidnapped,
attacked or harassed.

The Mexican police, critics charge, have done little to solve the
crimes committed against the men and women who report the news,
and, they say, federal authorities have made scant efforts to
improve the situation.

But after meeting last week with Mexican President Ernesto
Zedillo and other government and human rights officials, a
delegation from the Inter American Press Association expressed
hope that the climate here may be changing.

"We got the commitment from the president telling us that he will
do something," said Ricardo Trotti, an official with the
organization whose membership includes nearly 1,400 newspapers
from Argentina to Canada. "What we have criticized in the past is
political indifference. Right now, we can see (the Mexican
government) has committed itself."

Ten members of the IAPA, including Tony Pederson, vice president
and managing editor of the Houston Chronicle, were in Mexico City
last week for a series of meetings that focused in large part on
the unsolved killings of two Mexican journalists, one in Baja
California state in 1988 and another in Chihuahua state in 1991.
The cases are representative of how the others have been
mishandled, said Trotti, who attended the meetings.

In only one of the two cases, the killing of the coeditor with
Tijuana weekly newspaper Zeta, has there been any noticeable
progress, said Trotti, and in neither has the mastermind been
brought to justice.

Tired of the lack of action, the press association's
representatives asked Zedillo to order his administration to take
control of the cases.

Zedillo said he would ask the National Human Rights Commission to
further investigate the killings. If the commission finds a
federal element to a crime, it can recommend that the case be
taken by a federal judge.

"The president was very clear that no crime must go unpunished,"
said presidential spokesman Alejandro Carrillo.

Although the human rights commission, which has investigated the
cases for several years, has not yet advised the central
government to assume responsibility, the IAPA members were
nevertheless encouraged that Zedillo appeared keen to listen.

The meeting and tone also helped mend fences. Zedillo, unlike his
counterparts from Colombia and Guatemala, did not attend a two
day gathering of IAPA newspaper executives in Guatemala City in
August, at which jurists, politicians and human rights activists
poured over the two Mexican cases and four others from Colombia
and Guatemala.

That absence led some IAPA members to believe the Mexican
president did not take the matter seriously enough. The
association issued a report calling on governments to improve
their records of solving murders of journalists and, if
necessary, to appoint special prosecutors to deal with the
crimes.

"What prompted this meeting was concern that ... Zedillo did not
attend," said another of those who met with the president, Earl
Maucker, the editor of The SunSentinel of south Florida. "They
seemed very concerned. We were very pleased."

Others who deal with press freedom issues continued to express
pessimism, including those at the New Yorkbased Committee to
Protect Journalists.

More journalists have been killed in Mexico this year than in any
other nation in the Americas, said the organization's Latin
American coordinator, Joel Simon. "Mexico is leading the world in
terms of the highest number of journalists killed (in 1997)," he
said.

The violence peaked this summer with the killing of Benjamin
Flores, a newspaper editor in San Luis Rio Colorado, a dusty
desert town on the border with Arizona. Flores, the director of
the newspaper La Prensa, was shot dead July 15 by gunmen later
identified as hirelings of a jailed drug trafficker.

That slaying was accompanied by the killing of the editor of a
small newsweekly in the Pacific Coast state of Guerrero and of a
crime reporter for a small Mexico City political magazine.

Journalists in Guerrero, Sinaloa and Chihuahua states also
reported being harassed, some of them by federal police agents.
The Committee to Protect said attacks on reporters in Mexico are
expected to exceed the 10 cases documented last year.

The one bright spot is the quick reaction in the Flores case,
said Simon. State authorities moved quickly to detain the
masterminds of the crime, and four men are in jail. That, though,
is an exception to the norm, he said.

With the nation's judicial system in chaos and resources already
stretched to the limit, there appears little hope of a quick
turnaround, he said.

"I don't see any evidence that these cases in the long run are
going to be resolved any more easily than they have been in the
past," said Simon.

Andrew Downie is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City.