THE BODIES of three photojournalists have been found dismembered in the east Mexican state of Veracruz, days after a crime reporter for a national magazine was killed in her house there.
The motives for the killings were not immediately known, and few such cases in Mexico are solved. But human rights groups condemned the deaths as another worrying sign of the vulnerability of journalists reporting on the wave of drug and organised crime violence that has rocked Mexico in the past six years and left more than 50,000 people dead.
The bodies of the three photojournalists were discovered on World Press Freedom Day and less than a week after Mexico’s congress approved a law granting protection to journalists who have received threats.
“What we have seen in Mexico in the last years is a systematic attempt to muzzle the press that has been successful in various parts of the country, where the press has been effectively censored,” said Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, in Austin, Texas “This unprecedented bloodbath is fuelled by a certainty of impunity, as the cases of crimes against the press usually don’t even reach a court of law.”
The deaths of the Veracruz journalists in the past week were the first documented killings of Mexican journalists this year, according to press groups; last year 11 were killed, and, according to Article 19, a press freedom group, 44 have been killed in the past six years since drug crime soared and a government offensive began.
The criminal gangs are known to use bribes and death threats to dictate coverage or suppress it. The authorities have also suggested that some journalists have worked for the cartels, although the Committee to Protect Journalists, a watchdog group based in New York, said there was little evidence to support this claim.
Two of the journalists whose bodies were discovered on Thursday, wrapped in plastic bags in a canal in Boca del Rio, were identified as Gabriel Huge and Guillermo Luna, who had both worked for local newspaper Notiver before leaving the state for their own safety. They had recently returned to work for Veracruz News. The third was Esteban Rodriguez, a cameraman for TV Azteca and most recently a photographer for Diario AZ. The body of Irasema Becerra, Luna’s girlfriend, was found with him.
Notiver covers a state rapidly becoming one of Mexico’s most violent. Last June, Miguel Angel Lopez Velasco, a columnist and the newspaper’s editorial director, was shot to death with his wife and one of his children. A month later, Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, one of the newspaper’s police reporters, was found with her throat slit.
Last Saturday, Regina Martinez, the reporter who worked for the muckraking Proceso magazine and had written on ties between the local police and organised crime, was found beaten and strangled in her house in the capital of Veracruz, Xalapa. – ( New York Times service)