Publish and Perish

It is not healthy to be an independent journalist in Mexico. In the last 16 years more than two dozen journalists have been murdered, and not one of the murders has been solved.

The Mexican government has corrupted, with money and pressure and favors, much of the Mexican press, and many journalists not directly bought, practice a self-protective kind of self-censorship. And the black hands of the drug traffickers are a constant threat.

So the murder on Wednesday of Hector (Gato) Felix Miranda, a widely read, iconoclastic Tijuana editor and columnist, immediately raised the suspicion that the death was a political assassination. Felix, co-owner of the weekly, Zeta, spared no one from the Mexican political Establishments of his city, state and nation in his broad and often personal satire.

It is therefore incumbent upon the Mexican police and judicial authorities and the president of Mexico, Miguel de la Madrid, and the governor of Baja California Norte, Xicotencatl Levya Mortera, to make sure that this murder not go, like all the others, unsolved.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the presidential candidate of the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, has been campaigning on a pledge to make the promise of Mexican democracy more credible. The government of Mexico can make good on that pledge by sincerely and thoroughly investigating the murder of Felix.