JOURNALISTS' SAFETY IN MEXICO IS BIG CONCERN

Times reporter Adriana Gomez Licon spent Thanksgiving week traveling
to Veracruz, Mexico. She was reporting on the thousands of residents
there who were living in Ciudad Juarez but now, through a
government-sponsored relocation program, had been sent back to
Veracruz due to the violence on the border.

The story she produced in the four days she spent traveling through
Mexico, and the work of photographer Jesus Alcazar, show up on this
morning's front page.

Later today, at the University of Texas at El Paso, top editors from
news organizations across the United States and Mexico will gather to
talk about how to ensure the safety of journalists, like Gomez Licon,
who report out of Mexico.

Among those in attendance: Alejandro Junco de la Vega, CEO and
chairman of Grupo Reforma of Mexico City; Alfredo Carbajal, managing
editor of Al Dia, the Spanish-language newspaper of The Dallas
Morning News; Gustavo Salas Chavez, Mexico's special prosecutor for
crimes against freedom of expression; Milton Coleman, senior editor
of The Washington Post and president of the American Society of News
Editors and vice president of the Inter-American Press Association;
Katherine Corcoran, who leads the Mexico City bureau for The
Associated Press; Dale Leach, head of AP in Texas; Carlos Mauricio
Flores, executive editor of El Heraldo newspaper out of Tegucigalpa,
Honduras; Anders Gyllenhaal, vice president of news for the McClatchy
Co. and head of its Washington, D.C., bureau; Julio E. Munoz, the
executive director of the Inter-American Press Association; and
Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio News-Express.

The list goes on and on -- no doubt an impressive collection of
journalists and thinkers who shape and mold the majority of stories
coming out of Mexico as the country continues to wage war against its
drug cartels.

Other attendees: Tim Johnson, bureau chief in Mexico City for
McClatchy; Wendy Benjaminson, who heads up AP's international
drug-war beat team; Diana Fuentes, editor at the Laredo Morning
Times; Alfredo Quijano Hernandez, editor of El Norte de Ciudad
Juarez; Mike O'Connor, who is the Mexico representative for the
Committee to Project Journalists; Eric Olson, senior associate for
security policy at the Woodrow Wilson Center's Mexico Institute; Raul
Plascencia Villanueva, president of Mexico's National Commission on
Human Rights; and Armando Velez, editor for El Diario de El Paso.

We will spend today and Monday figuring out the best and safest way
for journalists to continue to report in Mexico. Because if we don't,
the violence spawned by drug-cartel wars will prevail over the
ability of journalists to report freely and without fear of losing
their lives -- and that can't happen.

It is an important discussion, and the fact it is taking place in El
Paso is a credit to the work by editors Carbajal, Coleman,
Gyllenhaal, Leach and Rivard, who organized and pushed for it.

We appreciate their holding the conversation on the El Paso-Ciudad
Juarez border, where the violence has been the worst.

Of course, the El Paso Times will continue to dispatch reporters into
Mexico to report on the situation. We do so in unity with our fellow
journalists across Mexico and Latin America, and we will stand with
them during the best and worst of times.