Murdered Mexican journalist latest manifestation of a dangerous trend

On Jan. 8, at around 11 p.m., Valentín Valdés, a reporter for a local paper in the northern Mexican town of Saltillo, drove away from his newsroom accompanied by a coworker and a friend. Shortly thereafter, two pickups blocked their path. A group of armed men forced Valdés and his colleague out of their car and into the trucks, and sped off. The coworker was beaten and then released, but Valdés was tortured and shot five times. His body was discovered outside of a hotel the next day. Thus Valdés, who was 29, went from being another anonymous journalist laboring in a dangerous climate to being the first reporter killed in Mexico (and quite likely on the planet) in 2010.

A sign on Valdés body read, "This is what's going to happen to those who don't understand, the message is for everyone." Authorities interpreted this as a reference to a series of editorials on anti-crime operations written at his newspaper in the two weeks before his abduction. The offense, they say, was deviating from the official story and publishing information from various sources.

Days after the Valdés killing, authorities discovered the body of newspaper reporter José Luis Romero in Ahome, Sinaloa, two states away from Saltillo. Romero's abduction, in turn, came just days after the murder of a newspaper owner in the Caribbean resort town of Tulum.

This spate of killings is a dark episode in a country that often competes for the dubious title of the most dangerous in the world for reporters. "It's the worst in the Americas, one of the worst in the world," said Carlos Lauría, Americas program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), of the situation for Mexican journalists. Indeed, in 2009 only the Philippines, which witnessed the massacre of 30 journalists during an election campaign, registered more than the 12 killings of Mexican journalists.

Nor is this a new problem. The CPJ tracks killings of reporters in Mexico going back to 1992. In his 2005 book En Estado de Alerta (in English, In a State of Alert), the legendary Tijuana muckraker Jesús Blancornelas, who himself survived an assassination attempt that left a bodyguard dead in 1997, wrote about murders of journalists stretching back half a century.

Whatever the historical roots of the threat against Mexican reporters, the primary reason for the danger today is organized crime. For drug traffickers operating with government complicity in geographic backwaters, a nosy reporter can increase notoriety and threaten their impunity. "[There is] constant widespread violence [with] the war between the cartels," said Lauría. "Reporters who dig, who work on crime stories, or even those who don't work on crime, are being targeted. The cartels are terrorizing the public, that's their intention."

The effect on the free press is predictably damaging, even for those media outlets that have never been targeted. "It's almost impossible to be able to report the news in that context," Lauría said. "Most sources are contaminated, there's a lot of fear, and a lot of intimidation."

Measures of self-protection run from not naming names of suspects and eliminating reporters' bylines to the media outlet essentially serving as government spokespeople on crime stories, repeating only what information the authorities provide, without seeking further or alternative explanations.

"The PGR [Mexico's version of Justice Department] tells us something, and we take it as the truth, without crossing-checking, without verifying" said Marco Lara, who follows the threats to Mexican reporters for the Instituto para la Seguridad y Democracia (Institute for Security and Democracy), of the nation's journalists.

Lara said that this often turns journalists into a proxy for anger against the government. "Journalists end up like a sausage," Lara said. "We are stuck in the middle."

Furthermore, outright self-censorship in many parts of Mexico is rampant. Sometimes, reporters altogether avoid writing about even conspicuous public events. As the CPJ's Michael O'Connor wrote on Jan. 15, "[Last year] there was major gun battle between the Mexican army and the cartel in Matamoros that lasted an hour...But, according to a Matamoros editor, in his town, ‘No one covered that story. No one. It closed the center of the city, but we got the order to close our eyes.'"

The result of all this is that in many parts of the nation, a rumor has the same validity as a news story. In towns where the firefights don't make the papers, email chains and water-cooler gossip, typically less reliable than a news report, fill the vacuum. "[The society] doesn't know how big the threat is because they don't have the tools," Lara said. "Rumors turn into a means of communication."

Despite the chilling effect on the press and the impact on Mexico as an open society, the government has shown precious little investigative gusto. "The Mexican state has showed a total failure to prosecute these crimes," Lauría said. "[They are] making the press journalists vulnerable to attack."

One of the solutions that many analysts support is stronger shield laws that render any crimes against journalists a federal offense. (Indeed, a bill along those lines was passed by Mexico's lower legislative house last year, but it never made it out of the Senate.) The theory is that taking the investigations out of the hands of the corrupt local authorities will ensure vigorous prosecutions.

But while he acknowledged that local authorities are "often corrupted", Lara is not encouraged by federal attempts to investigate journalistic attacks. "He hasn't solved anything," Lara said of a special federal prosecutor for crimes against reporters appointed in 2005. "They are absolutely incompetent."

Even if the federalization of such crimes is a step in the right direction, there's no guarantee that properly diligent investigations will do much to take journalists out of the line of fire. "I don't think there is any magic bullet at this time to stop the violence," Lauría said.

The vigorousness of investigations is, to a certain degree, irrelevant to the forces placing journalists in the crosshairs. The larger issue of organized crime in Mexico will not be resolved in the near future, which means people like Valentín Valdés will remain targets.