VIOLENCE AGAINST JOURNALISTS GROWS IN MEXICO'S DRUG WAR

Latest Victim Gunned Down in Front of Home

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Armando Rodriguez, at El Diario newspaper,
was the top crime reporter in the deadliest city in Mexico. He had
seen it all. But this was different. This was personal. Earlier this
month, someone had hung the decapitated body of a local drug thug
from a bridge on the airport road. Later the head appeared downtown
at the Plaza of Journalists, wrapped in a plastic bag, carefully
placed at the foot of a statue of a newsboy hawking papers.

Arturo Chacon, a reporter at El Norte, a competing daily in this
tough border city, said the message was unmistakable: Journalists
beware. "We knew it was bad, but we didn't know how bad," he said. "A
week later I heard the shots, and then I heard they got Armando."

Rodriguez, 40, was killed Nov. 13 in front of his home by a single
gunman. He was shot 10 times while warming up his car, directly in
front of his 8-year-old daughter, as he was about to drive her to
school in the morning. The slaying highlighted the growing danger to
Mexican journalists reporting on the drug war, which has claimed more
than 4,500 lives since President Felipe Calderon unleashed the army
and police against the cartels and corrupt officials in early 2007.
Most journalists continue to do their jobs but concede they are
limiting their coverage of the carnage.

The attacks against journalists, which run from threats hissed on
their cellphones to grenades lobbed into their newsrooms, form a new
front in the larger war the drug cartels are waging against Mexico's
social and government institutions. The resulting damage is
undermining Mexican civil society as the rich, powerful cartels
compete for control of smuggling routes into the United States, which
is consuming all the cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana the
cartels can deliver.

Mexican journalists say the threats may serve to muzzle their
investigations and stop them from naming names. They also suggest
that the cartels are attacking them to demonstrate their own power.
For years, Mexican journalists often served as stenographers to the
government. Now an increasingly independent press is being weakened
by the drug war, just when society may need it most.

Since 2000, 28 journalists have been slain and eight others have
disappeared and are assumed dead, according to Ricardo Gonzalez of
the group Article 19, which works to protect freedom of expression in
Mexico, now the most dangerous country in Latin America in which to
be a journalist. Gonzalez said, "Journalists are now included among
the casualties of this war."

Five reporters have been killed this year. "The border is now a
terrifying place to be a journalist, and Juarez is ground zero," said
Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The extreme violence is fueled by both the crackdown on traffickers
by the Calderon administration and a power struggle between two
competing cartels, one based in Juarez, the other in Culiacan, bitter
enemies engaged in a mafia bloodbath. The United States has pledged
$400 million to help Calderon fight the cartels.

A week ago, two grenades exploded outside the offices of El Debate
newspaper in Culiacan. No one was injured. "I don't know if they were
narcos or if this was an act of revenge or just some jokers. But we
think it was a message, a message for all media and the government,"
said Lucia Mimiaga, editorial director at El Debate. Several
newspapers have been attacked by men spraying bullets from machine
guns in the past two years.

Editors at many newspapers and television stations now say they no
longer deeply investigate the cartels or attempt to plot the
intersecting lines of corruption and cash between the drug
traffickers and their partners in government, business and law
enforcement. News directors insist that organized crime in Mexico now
employs all the tools of terrorism -- violence, threats,
sophisticated use of media -- to create an atmosphere of fear and impunity.

"I am the first to recognize that this situation is intolerable,"
Chihuahua state Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez said in a
statement promising to find Rodriguez's killer. Yet the police have
arrested no suspects, and none of the journalists interviewed here
expect the case to be solved. Rodriguez was not robbed. His editor
calls the killing "an assassination."

Reporters along the border say they are routinely threatened in phone
calls, e-mails and on Internet comment boards. Many times, the
journalists say, they know who is calling but dare not report the
warnings to authorities for fear their complaints will be passed to
cartel enforcers, who include former and current military and police
officers. Many say their families beg them to find other work, or
cover sports, business or society news.

Ciudad Juarez, a major border crossing crowded with Burger Kings and
rough cantinas, is a gritty industrial city of 1.5 million people
across the Rio Grande from El Paso. There have been 1,300 homicides
in Juarez this year, including the deaths of more than 60 police
officers. Thirty people were slain in Juarez just last week, many in
daylight hours, in gangland-style executions. On Friday, 10 people
were killed, including a triple homicide. On Saturday, an
intensive-care nurse from El Paso was killed with a friend while
traveling to Juarez to attend the funeral of her sister, who was also
slain last week.

The killings can be spectacularly gruesome. A week ago in Juarez, a
bullet-riddled body was found stuffed upside down in a large pot used
to cook pork, with the legs sticking out. Recently another body
appeared in front of a central police station, tied to a fence. The
body was put there as children arrived for school across the street.

Several reporters have fled Juarez. Jorge Luis Aguirre, the owner of
a popular Juarez news Web site called La Polaka, told reporters he
was threatened by phone while on his way to Rodriguez's funeral. He
gathered his family and raced to the United States. A correspondent
for the Mexico City-based Reforma newspaper also left the city. A
reporter for El Diario crossed the border after being threatened and
is seeking political asylum in El Paso after repeated threats.

In Juarez, where a journalist might earn about $200 a week, the
newspapers have removed bylines as a security measure. Photographers
wear Kevlar vests. Reporters have been ordered by their editors not
to arrive at crime scenes before the police, and when they do go,
they are told to arrive in groups, along with their competitors.
Police routinely tell reporters to stay away entirely from certain
crime scenes.

"Right now we have no permanent police reporters," said Alfredo
Quijano, editor of El Norte. Because of threats, his two crime
reporters have been reassigned to other duties, he said. "We're in a
tough spot. We're trapped between the police and the mafia -- and
they are making a sandwich of the journalists," he said.

Quijano said he is limiting stories to the facts of a killing -- the
who, what, where, when -- and forgoing questions about the why. "We
print the basic news. What the government says. So we are not
publishing everything we know, which is not good. But we are trying
to survive," Quijano said.

Pedro Torres, editor at El Diario, was a close friend of Rodriguez,
who was a godfather to his young son. As Torres was being
interviewed, his cellphone rang with the news that a dentist down the
street had just been kidnapped from his clinic by a gang of armed
men. The information did not faze him.

"No longer do they just threaten us," Torres said. "Now they act."

Torres said he does not know who killed his ace reporter. "Many
people assume he was killed by the narcos, but I am not so sure," he
said. "He was killed by organized crime, I will say that. In Mexico,
organized crime can mean the traffickers, the police, the government,
or the people in the office buildings."

Some of the last stories Rodriguez wrote include reports about
relatives of a top prosecutor in Chihuahua state, where Juarez is
located. Rodriguez tied the relatives to the drug trade. The
prosecutor is the same Patricia Gonzalez who vowed to find Rodriguez's killer.

In the dark world of drugs and corruption in Juarez, speculation
about Rodriguez's death is rampant. Some of his fellow journalists
wonder why he would have been killed by the drug traffickers, since
he had covered them for so long. Why now?

"Perhaps it was not even personal," said Jesus Meza, president of the
Association of Journalists in Ciudad Juarez. "Maybe it wasn't
anything he wrote. He was a prominent journalist. He was known. So he
was killed as a symbol. He was killed to create panic and paranoia.
This is a technique of terrorism. They want everyone to be afraid,
because that will destabilize the society."

The slain reporter's wife, Blanca Martinez, is preparing to leave
Juarez with her children, perhaps to seek asylum in the United
States. "When he wrote, he was an aggressive man. He wrote strong and
hard," she said in an interview a week after her husband's death. She
sat quietly in their study, dark circles of grief bruising her eyes,
as her children played in the living room.

The two met when they both worked at a local TV station. She does not
know who killed her husband. The couple recently spent several months
in El Paso after previous threats by cellphone in January. She
agreed, "Yes, maybe he was a symbol."

After a while Martinez said, "I just want to get out of this house."