THE BORDER REPORT

Is Caborca, Sonora, changing hands? If so, the latest would-be owners want everybody out, the narcos, the cops and the mayors of the Pinacate. And the new guys are backed by Macho Prieto, Mayo Zambada’s security chief.

What happened here last week was a sheer massacre, the carnage going far beyond what now passes for normal along the Mexican border.

The incident started with a mass kidnapping of four people in Plutarco Elias Calles, late Wednesday night. What happened next was pure Macho M.O., down to the matching cars, reminiscent of the Bazucaso de Obregón in early ‘05. On Thursday afternoon, a convoy of five Yukons stopped outside the state police substation, gunmen attacking the building with machine guns fired from the sunroofs. Nothing more than intimidation; only two hundred rounds and no serious injuries. The coup de grace came Friday when a Yukon blew past a federal checkpoint, headed north. The Policia Federal Preventiva chased the Yukon and found it abandoned on the side of road heading north to Sonoyta and the U.S. border. Inside the SUV, police found the bodies of eleven men, nine had been burned and chopped to pieces, the heads, arms and legs removed.

Read on….

His departure follows the killing of crime reporter Armando Rodríguez last week, who was shot to death on Thursday November 13th when he was in his car.

Aguirre told the Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET), a non-profit based in Mexico City, that when he was on the way to reporter Armando Rodríguez Carreón’s funeral last week he received a call on his cell phone.

“They told me, ‘You’re next,’ and because of the way things are, I decided to take my family and leave,” said Aguirre.

“I left everything: my house, my office. I left my car in a public parking lot. I was very scared. I didn’t ask the authorities for help, I don’t trust them.”

BorderReporter.com did some digging around about what was going on just before Armando Rodríguez was killing last week.

I’ve ascertained a few details from Juárez, some chismes that a few birds sang last night.

On October 29, Rodriguez, a cops reporter for El Diario, had co-written a story about the murder of a nephew of Chihuahua State Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez. The story in its entirety is at the end of this posting in case it’s removed from the Diario site. He pretty much knocked that one out of the ballpark.

The nephew, Andrés Sanchez Pineda was murdered along with two other men. Forty-three AK-47 rounds were found at the scene.

In the story, Rodriguez and the other reporter noted that the nephew, Andrés Sanchez Pineda had been arrested in El Paso, Texas, three years before for trafficking more than 350 pounds of weed. He pleaded guilty, admitting that he was supposed to haul the weed in a tractor-trailer to Tennessee. Carry on reading here…

When he was murdered in late October, he’d been driving a Dodge Ram truck that belonged to the State of Chihuahua. Sanchez was not a government employee.

“La Polaka” is an online political newspaper that frequently, according to CEPET, publishes critical reports. It covers information from the state capital of Chihuahua City, Ciudad Juárez, and El Paso, Texas.

The persecution of journalists here in Mexico is common. Just this weekend, two grenades were thrown at the offices of the Culiacán newspaper El Debate. The explosions, which shattered windows but caused no injuries. Click here for more.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

The Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders have both condemned the killing.

The CPJ reports:

An unidentified assailant shot Rodríguez, 40, a reporter for the local daily “El Diario”, at least eight times with a 9mm weapon, according to Mexican news reports and CPJ interviews. Rodríguez was sitting in a company-owned Nissan sedan parked inside his garage at about 8 a.m. when he was shot, local authorities told CPJ. His young daughter, Ximena, who was in the car at the time of the attack, was uninjured. According to Jaime Torres Valadez, the local mayor’s spokesman, the reporter was pronounced dead at the scene.

“We mourn the death of Armando Rodríguez and offer our deepest condolences to friends and family,” said Carlos Lauría, CPJ’s senior program coordinator for the Americas. “The unprecedented wave of violence against the Mexican press must be halted immediately. We urge state and federal authorities to promptly investigate Rodríguez’s slaying and bring those responsible to justice. Mexico needs to break the cycle of impunity in crimes against journalists.”

According to BorderReporter.com:

The motive is unknown except that Rodriguez covered the crime beat for his newspaper, El Diario de Juárez, for more than a decade.

The newspaper is staying silent about the murder thus far, but this is what my colleagues in Juárez and some law enforcement sources in Texas report this morning:

Rodriguez had actually fled recently to El Paso recently; I don’t know if he used his cross-border visa or had sought political asylum. But believing he was safe, he returned to Juárez and resumed work at the newspaper. A threat came in over the past few weeks, I’m unclear on the date still, and the newspaper sought police protection for him but none was forthcoming.

Rodriguez is the second news reporter at El Diario to flee Mexico for the United States. A second, whom I will not name for security reasons, is currently living in the United States under asylum.

Five journalists have now been murdered in Mexico this year and one has gone missing, says Carlos Lauria with the The New York-based, Committee to Protect Journalists.

OAXACA — At the beginning of the month, two presenters for a community radio station in San Juan Copala, Oaxaca state, in southeast Mexico, were shot dead when traveling on the highway connecting Joya del Mamey to Putla de Guerrero.

The dead, Felicitas Martínez Sánchez and Teresa Bautista Merino were both in their early twenties and worked for La Voz que Rompe el Silencio (The Voice That Breaks the Silence), a community radio station run mainly by young adults and teenagers from the Triqui indigenous community.

Four other people were wounded in the attack, which took place between 1:00 and 2:00 p.m. (local time) on 7 April 2008, according to information released by the Centro de Apoyo Comunitario Trabajando Unidos A.C. (CACTUS) – a civil society organisation that works in the area.

CACTUS human rights work coordinator Omar Esparza indicated that “the group had gone out to do reporting and interview people. They were indigenous reporters carrying out a task assigned by the community authorities.”

The attack was condemned by Reporters Without Borders, Article 19 and AMARC – the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters. All three NGOs called for a clarification of the events of that day, protection of the survivors, punishment of the perpetrators and an end to impunity for people who commit crimes against journalists in Mexico in a joint statement.

PUEBLA – In the same week, the launch of Lydia Cacho’s book was obstructed in the city of Puebla, the capital of the state of the same name, which is governed by Mario Marin – the state governor implicated in her book about a paedophile ring in Cancun.

Cacho, who launched the book ‘Memorias de una infamia’ in Mexico City earlier this year (pictured), launched the book in Puebla on April 5th. Prior to its launch, a billboard advertising the book was taken down by state police.

Norma Bautista, communications chief for Random House Mondadori publishers, told “El Universal” newspaper that, on 14 March, her company erected a billboard in the city of Puebla to advertise the book’s publication.

“We were later told that the advertisement had been removed because the structure was unsafe,” said Bautista. However, the billboard structure remained in place; only the advertisement had been removed and replaced with another.”

El Universal also reported that Cacho alleged Marin launched a campaign of intimidation prior to the launch of the book.

SINALOA – Finally, the conviction of four men for the 2004 murder of photographer Gregorio Rodríguez Hernández was welcomed by the Committee for the Protection of Journalists.

Rodríguez was gunned down in front of his family in a cafeteria in the town of Escuinapa on November 28, 2004. The 35-year-old photographer worked for the Mazatlán edition of the newspaper El Debate.

Armed men approached Rodríguez when he was eating with his wife and sons, 3 and 6, and opened fire, according to The Associated Press and local news reports. He was shot at least five times, news reports said.

But freelance journalist and organized crime reporter Michel Marizco, who covers the Mexican border with the United States through his site BorderReporter.com, sees it another way.

He says, in a column for The News here in Mexico which is also published here on his website, that the 11 years sentences handed down to former police chief Abel Enríquez Zavala and the three hitmen working for police at the time – Pedro Salas Franco, Francisco Pineda Sarmiento, and Elías Álvarez González – is a sad reflection of how Mexico has receded over the last few years.

“Rodriguez is dead but I hope his case stays alive. First, because 11 years for a pre-meditated murder is inexcusable. Secondly, his killing shows that there is no battle being waged between good and evil, security forces versus criminals. The line between the two blurred long ago.

“It’s now indistinguishable.”