Taking News to the Brink

Journalists in the United States are spoiled rotten. We take for granted our freedom to report and write on public affairs. And when we must defend freedom of the press, it’s usually in a courtroom with attorneys at our side.

How else to explain the comparative apathy I sense from so many of my colleagues over what happened on Thanksgiving Day to one of the most courageous editors I know--Jesus Blancornelas, of Zeta, a weekly newspaper in Baja California.

Zeta has an honorable history of aggressive reporting on drug trafficking and related corruption. But Blancornelas’ exercise of press freedom nearly ended not in a hushed courtroom, but in a noisy shootout on a Tijuana street corner. And the 62-year-old editor survived not because he had a good lawyer, but a good bodyguard.

As recounted in the latest edition of Zeta, the attempted assassination sounds like a horrible set piece in an action movie:

Thanksgiving not being a holiday in Mexico, Blancornelas set off for his office about 9 a.m. He rode in the passenger seat of a Ford Explorer driven by his bodyguard, Luis Valero.

As always, Valero varied his route from Blancornelas’ home to the Zeta office as a precaution. But near the newspaper building, Valero had to stop at an intersection. There a man standing on the corner pulled out an automatic weapon and began firing at the Explorer.

Valero tried to turn the Explorer away from the gunman. But he was hemmed in by two other cars. Realizing what was about to happen, Valero threw himself on Blancornelas just as gunmen in the two other cars opened fire with automatic weapons, then sped away.

The attack left Blancornelas grievously wounded in the throat, midsection and hand. He remains in serious condition but is expected to recover. Valero was killed, as was the gunman on the street corner. That would-be assassin, cut down by stray bullets fired by the other gunmen, turned out to be a major figure in a big story Zeta had been covering.

Mexican authorities identified him as David Barron Corona, a professional killer also known by the alias “C.H.� Only a week before the attack, Blancornelas had run Barron Corona’s photo on the cover of Zeta. It accompanied a report that a hit man known as C.H. was suspected in the Nov. 14 murder of two Mexican soldiers assigned to anti-drug operations in Tijuana.

It was precisely the kind of investigative reporting for which Zeta is well-known. But it apparently hit too close too home for the drug-trafficking gangs that have been responsible for so much violence in Tijuana for the last several years.

The most worrisome element of this story for me, as it should be for all my American colleagues, is that the thug who tried to kill Blancornelas was from the United States. Barron Corona grew up in San Diego and was affiliated with the so-called Mexican Mafia, a California prison gang with links to drug traffickers.

This fits a frightening pattern that anti-drug investigators have noted recently--gangs from one side of the border using hit men from the other side to do their dirty work. The foreign thugs are not familiar to the local cops, making it easy to evade arrest and slip back home.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, of which I am a board member, has evidence that Blancornelas may be the second Mexican journalist targeted for murder by hired guns from the United States. The first may have been Benjamin Flores Gonzalez, the editor of La Prensa in San Luis Rio Colorado, across the border from Yuma, Ariz. He was gunned down on July 15, in another incident that has been sadly underreported in the U.S. press. Mexican court documents filed in the Flores Gonzalez case indicate that the drug traffickers believed to be behind the murder made many telephone calls to San Diego, perhaps to hire the assassins.

CPJ was founded in 1981 by U.S. journalists who had come to appreciate, through their work as foreign correspondents, the risks that their foreign colleagues often must take to cover news events in their homelands. Danger comes not just from dictatorial governments, but from political and religious fanatics, international terrorists and drug traffickers.

Only last month I was part of a CPJ delegation that met with Mexican journalists who want to create a similar organization for themselves. They were prompted to act by the murder of Flores Gonzalez and by escalating threats against other Mexican journalists, especially as the news media start to operate more freely, away from traditional government control. And among the provincial editors who traveled to Mexico City to help out was Jesus Blancornelas, accompanied by his bodyguard, Luis Valero.

I knew why Blancornelas needed a bodyguard. Ten years ago his friend and co-founder of Zeta, columnist Hector Felix Miranda, was shot to death in a murder that has never been fully solved. But I couldn’t help thinking how odd it was to see a slight, graying, soft-spoken man so closely guarded.

I’m glad now that he was so well-guarded. I only wish I’d told Valero how much I appreciated the job he was doing for an editor I greatly admire.