NEW YORK, 20 September 2010: The major daily in the war-wracked Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, El Diario, surprised media around the globe on Saturday when it published an unusual editorial that openly compromises the paper’s coverage in order to preserve its journalists’ lives.
Under the headline, What do you want from us?, the editorial pleads for the cartels to stop killing journalists, and asks them to clarify what journalists are allowed to publish in order to avoid adding to the long list of reporters killed in Mexico in the last decade.
In a bold move, the paper addresses the cartels directly, and even recognizes their power in Ciudad Juárez. “You are the de facto authorities in this city, since our legitimate representatives have been unable to prevent our colleagues from being killed,” the editorial reads in Spanish.
El Diario published the piece on its front page a day after a staff photographer, Luis Carlos Santiago, 21, was shot to death at a mall in Ciudad Juárez. Santiago is the second reporter working for the paper slain in the last two years, Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, research shows.
Unidentified assailants gunned down Armando Rodríguez Carreón, a veteran crime reporter at El Diario, in November 2008 in Ciudad Juárez. The investigation into the Rodríguez’s killing has stalled, a CPJ special report found in July. In the Saturday editorial, the newspaper claimed that local authorities will soon produce his supposed killer, but the man is only a scapegoat to conceal botched investigative work.
A clear example of the chilling effects journalists’ murders have on the local media, El Diario’s editorial is also an indicator of the urgency with which the government must intervene in the crisis affecting the Mexican press. Mexico has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries for media, with nine journalists killed in 2010, according to CPJ’s research. CPJ is working to determine whether these deaths were directly related to journalism.
On Wednesday, a joint CPJ-Inter American Press Association delegation will meet with President Felipe Calderón to discuss Mexico’s grave press freedom crisis.
