MEXICAN JOURNALISTS SCARED INTO SILENCE

Attack On Nuevo Laredo Paper Highlights Dangers To Reporters, Democracy.

A month ago, a sense of hope was surfacing among the shell-shocked
journalists of Nuevo Laredo. The city's El Manana newspaper was
hosting a first-of-its-kind conference aimed at giving Mexican
reporters the training and tools they need to investigate drug
trafficking.

More than 120 journalists, from Texas to Venezuela, took part in the
seminar. For our counterparts in Nuevo Laredo, the seminar was a show
of solidarity, a signal that despite the fact that they felt abandoned
by the local authorities, they weren't alone. As one veteran crime
reporter said, the visiting journalists were like a force field.

Hopefully, he said, the seminar would show police and traffickers that
there were a lot of eyes on the journalists of Nuevo Laredo, that an
attack on them would be answered by the wider community of journalists
in the hemisphere.

Perhaps no city has suffered so much at the hands of warring drug
cartels as Nuevo Laredo. The nearly daily executions, kidnappings and
gunbattles have devastated the city's tourism economy and brought a
feeling of dread to its residents. Two Nuevo Laredo journalists have
been killed since 2004, and neither slaying has been adequately
investigated by police. The result is that local journalists censor
themselves when it comes to writing about drug violence.

Just 10 days after the out-of-town journalists left Nuevo Laredo, the
optimism that marked the seminar was shattered. Two masked men burst
into the offices of El Manana, spraying the reception area with
machine-gun fire. They entered the newsroom, spewing threats, insults
and bullets, and hurled a grenade. A veteran reporter, Jaime Orozco
Tey, was shot five times and remains in the hospital.

Mexican authorities say the attack came from drug traffickers and was
aimed to intimidate the newspaper, the city's biggest, into silence.
And it seems no small coincidence that it came shortly after Mexican
journalists asserted their right to gather the news without the fear
of getting killed.

As journalists in the United States, we find it hard to imagine the
difficulties our counterparts south of the border face. We may fret
about a story's tone or fairness, or wake up in the middle of the
night worrying about a misspelled name or a wayward fact. Journalists
in Nuevo Laredo and other Mexican trouble spots have to worry that
what they write could get them killed.

Part of the problem is that, in Mexico, there still does not exist the
sense that killing a journalist for doing his or her work is
unacceptable. Mexican authorities haven't solved, or even adequately
probed, any of the nine killings of Mexican journalists in the last
five years, journalism defense groups say.

"The culture of fear has had devastating effects on the media," the
Committee to Protect Journalists concluded in a report on the El
Manana attack. "Reporters treat every gangland killing in isolation,
rarely following up or weaving the murder into the broader fabric of
crime that serves as the backdrop to their professional lives.
Investigative journalism died a long time ago . . . Reporters are
reluctant to cross the line because there are no safeguards. They have
lost faith in Mexico's law enforcement agencies and judiciary."

What happens in Nuevo Laredo is not nearly as removed as we might
think in Austin. The cartels that are destroying that city are
fighting over access to Interstate 35. And, if we're going to be
honest about it, they're fighting for the ability to supply our city
with the marijuana, cocaine and heroin that lubricates some of our
social scenes and feeds the appetites of our addicts.

In the short term, the drug traffickers may have succeeded in quieting
one media outlet. The editors of El Manana announced they will scale
back the already self-censored coverage of the city's violence.

As many journalists said during the seminar, no story is worth a life,
and it would be perverse to second-guess the brave journalists of El
Manana.

But it would be equally perverse to let the drug traffickers win. We
must ensure that the attack backfires, that it draws even more eyes to
Nuevo Laredo and convinces the perpetrators that attacking journalists
is more trouble than it's worth. Hopefully it will impel the Mexican
government to take the murders of journalists more seriously and
finally play the role of protector of a free press, a role demanded by
any true democracy.

Already the attack has brought one positive change: President Vicente
Fox has finally appointed a special prosecutor to investigate attacks
on journalists, albeit a year after he created the position. However,
the special prosecutor won't be investigating crimes that involve drug
traffickers and organized crime, the very groups who are terrorizing
Mexican journalists.

Mexican reporters need the freedom and security to do their jobs. One
way to help is to show both the government and the traffickers that we
are paying attention.