JOURNALIST SLAYINGS ON RISE

Five evenings a week, Amado Ramirez fielded complaints from his radio
listeners on everything from corrupt public officials to the booming
drug trade in this famous resort city.

Then, on a Friday night, just blocks from a beachside strip of bars
where thousands of tourists were partying, a gunman ambushed Ramirez
in his car as he attempted to leave his Radiorama office. Bleeding
profusely from bullet wounds in the chest, side and thigh, Ramirez
dragged himself several yards to a hotel to plead for help, according
to police and witness reports. Minutes later, he collapsed dead.

The April 6 slaying came as a shock even in this city inured to
drug-related violence. Ramirez, 50, who also worked as a
correspondent for the Televisa TV network, was the most prominent of
the more than two dozen reporters and editors slain nationwide since
2000. To his frightened colleagues, his death confirmed a chilling
fact: Mexico, in the grips of an escalating drug war, has become the
world's second-deadliest country for journalists after Iraq.

"Of course we're scared," said Ricardo Castillo, news director for
Acapulco's leading daily, El Sur. "He was the most visible of all of
us, and his murder was meant to send a message."

A Show Of Force

The killing was intended as a show of force by traffickers waging a
turf war for control of both the local market and the lucrative
smuggling routes to the United States, said Castillo.

"More than an effort to silence the media, it's part of a strategy to
instill terror," he said. "The assassination of a journalist isn't
just any killing. It touches the basic fibers of society."

The danger appears to be rising.

Statistics vary among watchdog groups, but they agree that Mexico has
surpassed Colombia, a country plagued by decades of guerrilla and
drug violence, in the number of journalists killed each year.

Seven Mexican journalists were slain last year, according to a count
by the Miami-based Inter American Press Association. The Paris-based
Reporters without Borders tallied nine killings, and the Federation
of Mexican Journalist Associations reported 11.

Three journalists were killed in Colombia last year, according to
Reporters without Borders. The group counted 65 journalists and media
assistants slain in Iraq over the past year.

Many Mexican reporters, particularly in the embattled border states,
have stopped writing about organized crime, and, as the drug war
spreads south, journalists across the country are becoming targets.

On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, the decapitated body of a local
drug dealer turned up outside a newspaper in the eastern port city of
Veracruz. According to local press reports, the killers left this
warning: "For Milo, you'll all pay. You know it, and more heads of
damned reporters are going to roll." The threat was presumed to be
directed at Milo Vera, a local columnist.

"There's total impunity," said Jose Antonio Calcanio, president of
the Federation of Mexican Journalists Associations, which represents
137 journalist groups nationwide.

"The government has no interest in resolving any of these cases,"
Calcanio said. "It's only when there's a prominent case like Amado
Ramirez that they pretend to act, but then they forget, and nothing happens."

Two suspects were arrested in the days after the radio host's
slaying, but both were released on bail. Many of Ramirez's colleagues
suspect the men were scapegoats.

In February 2006, amid pressure from international watchdog groups,
then-President Vicente Fox created a special prosecutor's office to
focus on crimes against journalists. The results have been slim,
critics say, in part because the office doesn't have jurisdiction
over organized crime cases. Those fall under the jurisdiction of
another office, the deputy attorney general's office for organized crime.

'No Teeth'

"They haven't been given the necessary teeth to do their job," said
Carlos Lauria, Americas director for the New York-based Committee to
Protect Journalists, who was active in pressuring for the creation of
the special prosecutor's office. Still, he blamed the country's
corrupt and inefficient judicial system for the lack of progress in
most of the cases.

The special prosecutor, Octavio Orellana, was not available for
comment. But he has defended his office in the past, saying its main
job is to prevent violence against journalists by squelching threats.

Nearly 1,000 people have died in gangland-style killings related to
drug-trafficking in the first four months of the year, compared with
2,000 in all of last year, according to Mexico City's El Universal
newspaper. The southwestern state of Guerrero, home to Acapulco, has
been one of the hardest hit, with some 300 gangland homicides last year.