Four journalists murdered in Mexico in a week

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2012/may/04/journalist-safety-mexico

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The morning after attending a panel discussion about the murders of Mexican journalists I am sad to report more killings.

On world press freedom day, the dismembered bodies of three press photographers - Gabriel Huge, Guillermo Luna and Esteban Rodríguez - were recovered from a shallow canal in the Mexican port city of Veracruz.

A fourth body, that of Luna's girlfriend, Irasema Becerra, was found alongside them.

The deaths follow within a week of the murder of another Veracruz journalist, Regina Martinez, who was a crime reporter for the national news magazine, Proceso. She was strangled to death at her home in the city of Xalapa.

Police said that the bodies of Huge and Luna, which were wrapped in plastic bags, showed signs of torture. They used to work for the newspaper Notiver, which has dared to cover the activities of drug cartels.

They later quit and left the state for their own safety, but had recently returned to work for a website called Veracruz News.

The latest murders underline Veracruz's current status as the most extreme focal point for attacks against journalists.

These have become commonplace in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against the drug cartels in December 2006 and extreme violence exploded across the country.

The region has been the scene of a bloody battle for control of drug-trafficking routes between two of Mexico's most powerful gangs - the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel.

Ricardo Gonzalez, of the press freedom activist group Article 19, said journalists in Veracruz are being targeted because of their position "as witnesses to the decomposition of the state."

He said said there had been "absolutely no advances" in the investigation of any of the previous murders of journalists in Veracruz.

Last June, Miguel Ángel López Velasco, Notiver's editorial director, was shot dead along with his wife and one of his children. A month later, Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, one of the paper's police reporters, was found with her throat slit.

According to Gonzalez, the state authorities have tended to hint that such killings were motivated by personal troubles, or filed them away as the work of the cartels.

This conveniently ignores the fact that corruption means it is often difficult to define where the authorities stop and organised crime begins.

Remembering murdered journalists

Indeed, that very point about corruption was made several times over during last night's seminar by members of the panel and people in the audience, including Mexican journalists.

The event was held to mark the launch of a photo exhibition in The Guardian foyer in memory of murdered Mexican journalists. Called The silenced: fighting for press freedom in Mexico, it will run until 13 May.

The exhibition is organised by the Catholic Overseas Development Agency (CAFOD) in company with The Guardian and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

<em>Sources:</em> BBC/The Guardian/New York Times