As Mexican journalists are finalizing the details of their protest this Saturday against violence and threats against the country’s media workers, President Felipe Calderón met with media owners and editors to pledge federal government support, El Universal and La Jornada report.
Federal police announced the arrest of suspected gang members who allegedly kidnapped three TV journalists in northern Mexico last week, The Associated Press reports.
Drug-related violence in Mexico has not only left more than 28,000 dead since 2006, it has also plunged the local press into a crisis, one that has laid bare the chronic weaknesses of Mexican journalism.
Javier Canales and Alejandro Hernández, two of the four journalists kidnapped by drug gangs in Durango state, were freed in a rescue operation Saturday, AFP reports. Cameraman Héctor Gordoa was freed Thursday and La Cronica de Hoy reports that the journalist Óscar Solís had been released last Tuesday.
Martín López, a journalist and host at Canal 44 in Ciudad Juárez, has joined the ranks of media workers who have sought asylum in the U.S. border city of El Paso, after receiving threats from drug traffickers.
Héctor Gordoa, one of four journalists who were kidnapped this week in Durango state, was dropped off at Televisa’s Torreón offices, where he worked, AFP and La Jornada report.
Two reporters and two cameramen were kidnapped from the city of Gómez Palacio in Durango state, where they were covering prisoner unrest, the Los Angeles Times reports. The inmates were protesting revelations that jail officials allegedly armed inmates and used them to carry out drug-related killings, BBC explains.
Just two days after four journalists were kidnapped in Durango state, Ulises González García was abducted from his home in the middle of the night, presumably to be held for ransom, La Jornada reports. The journalist is the director of the weekly paper La Opinión, based in Jerez, Zacatecas in north-central Mexico.
Journalists, public officials, and police chiefs in the northern border state of Chihuahua, one of the areas most effected by drug violence in recent years, are planning to create the country’s first "security protocol for journalists that cover risky areas," Devenir and Ahoramismo report.
At a time when journalists are targets of organized crime and violence against reporters goes largely unpunished, declaring an editorial war against corruption and drug trafficking seems suicidal. According to Prodavinci’s Oscar Medina, this is precisely the journey upon which the weekly Tijuana-based news magazine Zeta has embarked.
Over the first six months of this year, the region has passed Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, as the area with the most journalists killed, the International Press Institute announced in its Six-Month Death Watch report.
Ciudad Juárez is considered one of the most violent cities in the world but last week the city experienced, for the first time in history, a car bomb successfully attacking federal agents. Camerman Luis Hernández Núñez, from the television channel Telecinco, was injured as he recorded the moment of the explosion, reported El Universal.