For Journalists, It's Proved a Deadly Story

MEXICO'S KILLING FIELDS

Last Nov. 2, the body of Jose Bladimir Antuna Garcia, crime and
security affairs reporter for the newspaper El Tiempo de Durango, was
found in front of a hospital in the central Mexican city of Durango.
Antuna, 39, had been abducted on his way to work earlier that day. He
was declared to have died of "asphyxia from strangulation," though
according to some reports, his body also bore bullet wounds to the
head and abdomen.

A note found next to his body reportedly read: "This happened to me
for giving information to soldiers and for writing too much."

Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to work as
a journalist. From January 2004 to December 2009, a total of 27
writers -- 26 print journalists and one author -- were slain, seven
of them in 2009 alone. Five others have disappeared. Last month, two
more Mexican journalists were killed. Few if any of these crimes have
been properly investigated or prosecuted.

International PEN, the worldwide writers' organization, believes it
likely that these journalists were targeted in retaliation for their
critical reporting, particularly on drug trafficking. Though
organized-crime groups are believed to be responsible for many
attacks against journalists, government officials and the police are
also believed to have played a role in some.

In the week before his death, Jose Antuna had broken a story about
police corruption in Durango and had also been investigating the
unsolved killing of another journalist at his newspaper, Carlos
Ortega Samper, who was abducted and killed in May 2009. Antuna had
received repeated death threats starting in 2008 and was the target
of an apparent assassination attempt in April 2009. Despite reporting
the latter to the Durango state public prosecutor's office, Antuna
was not provided with any protection and continued to receive threats.

On May 26, the same day that another Durango-based journalist, Eliseo
Barron Hernandez, was found dead after having been kidnapped from his
home, an anonymous call was reportedly made to El Tiempo's offices
saying that Antuna would be next. The caller identified himself as a
member of Los Zetas, a paramilitary group reportedly linked to a drug cartel.

Last February, Mexico's human rights record was scrutinized for the
first time by the United Nations under the Universal Periodic Review.
Numerous member states took the opportunity to express concern about
the shocking violence faced by journalists in the country and the
apparent impunity of their attackers.

The Mexican government took the international community's
recommendations seriously and promised to better protect journalists,
investigate threats and violence against them more vigorously, and
ensure that the investigation and prosecution of such crimes would
become a federal rather than a state matter.

A year later, little has changed. Since the U.N. review, eight more
print journalists have been slain in Mexico and another has
disappeared. A number of these journalists were threatened before
their killing or disappearance, and yet apparently none had been
offered police protection or other measures to ensure their safety.
In none of these cases has the perpetrator been brought to justice.

In a recent article on the dangers of being a journalist in Mexico,
the award-winning Mexican investigative journalist and activist Lydia
Cacho criticized the Mexican mainstream media for failing to reflect
the true reality of the country, leaving the international community
uninformed. Cacho called on foreign journalists to fill this gap by
writing about the violence faced by their Mexican counterparts,
"because talking about us protects our life and allows us to go on
investigating and reporting."

So, let's not be silent about Mexico's killing field for journalists.
Let's call President Felipe Calderon and the Mexican state to account
for the 34 Mexican writers who since 2004 have paid the ultimate
price for "writing too much."