Tijuana Journalist, Father of Slaying Victim, Wounded in Ambush

In another alarming ambush of a public figure on the streets of Tijuana, gunmen shot and seriously wounded a journalist Monday as he headed to a news conference he had organized to denounce police inaction in the murder of his son last month.

Three gunmen shot veteran police reporter Dante Cortez, 65, and another son, Galileo, 22, as they left their house about 10:45 a.m. to drive to a restaurant where they had convened fellow journalists to discuss the case, said state government spokesman Gabriel Rosas.

Cortez planned to publicly disclose the names of the suspected killers, whom police have said are linked to drug traffickers, according to authorities and media colleagues. He was hit twice in the face and hospitalized in stable condition. His son, Galileo, who returned fire with a pistol he was carrying, underwent surgery for an abdomen wound and was expected to survive, authorities said.

Both victims were carrying pistols because their lives had been threatened, according to police and fellow journalists. Police were hunting for the youthful gunmen, whom the victims reportedly recognized as the same men suspected of killing Cortez’s son, also named Dante, last month.

On Monday afternoon, detectives searching the Los Olivos neighborhood a few blocks from the scene found an abandoned white Mercury Topaz believed to have been used by the gunmen.

The shooting sent a chill through Tijuana’s tight-knit press corps, many of whom rushed to Notre Dame Hospital to await word on the victims.

For weeks, Cortez had criticized the state judicial police for failing to arrest the suspected killers and had expressed fear for his life in an article he wrote for the daily El Mexicano on Friday. He said that he had been getting telephone death threats and that youths were watching his house and firing guns in the air.

“It is as if it was pre-announced,” said reporter Dora Elena Cortes of the daily El Universal, who is not related to the victim. “The question is: What were the police waiting for? He had made a very direct accusation and had said that he was being threatened. It seems that would have been enough to arrest them.”

Journalists in Tijuana and the rest of Mexico have periodically become casualties in violence related to drugs and corruption. Hector (Gato) Felix, the editor of Tijuana’s most prominent publication, the weekly Zeta, was killed in an ambush in 1988. Three gunmen were convicted, but no mastermind has ever been charged--despite continuing accusations that a wealthy, politically connected businessman ordered the crime.

Monday’s shooting grows out of a series of murders involving young Tijuana men from well-to-do families, youths known in Mexico as “juniors,” with suspected drug connections. The younger Dante Cortez was shot outside a party in an upscale neighborhood June 18, one of three friends who have been slain.

The elder Cortez had insisted in letters to newspapers that his son was not involved in drugs and that the murder resulted from a personal rivalry. But police and the press have linked the killers to the city’s powerful drug interests. As is often the case in suspected drug murders, police have made no arrests.

A mysterious aspect of the case is that the assailants apparently knew about the news conference, even though Cortez had only advised a few colleagues by telephone. There were suspicions Monday that the gunmen may have tapped his phone, a common practice among Mexico’s well-financed and sophisticated drug traffickers.

A veteran Tijuana editor said there is another, more chilling, possibility: that someone connected to the news media tipped off the gunmen.