Attack Focuses Spotlight on Crusading Tijuana Press

Jesus Blancornelas, one of Mexico’s most respected journalists, lies in a hushed intensive care unit, taking forced breaths from a respirator, struggling to recover from the bullet wounds of a botched assassination attempt by the Tijuana drug cartel.

Outside, poker-faced security forces with semiautomatic weapons surround the hospital to prevent drug gunmen from returning to finish off the job.

And as Blancornelas rests, the crusading young reporters of his Tijuana news weekly, Zeta, are working feverishly to break precisely the kind of hard-hitting stories that nearly cost him his life.

The city’s small but growing corps of muckrakers cover a dark drama that has brought them to the brink of the mystery-shrouded assassination of a presidential candidate and immersed them in a grungy, deadly drug story whose blood-spattering public executions recall the gangland mob warfare of Chicago’s Roaring ‘20s.

In a region where impunity and corruption have feathered a comfortable, if bloody, nest for Mexico’s most murderous drug lords, the relentless coverage of these underpaid reporters puts them on intimate footing--if not a head-on collision course--with organized crime.

And if the zeitgeist of American journalism sometimes seems closer to “Hard Copy” than Watergate, this emerging group of reporters recalls the old-fashioned journalistic values and sense of urgency that once romanticized the profession.

“It is a sensitive job. With the lawlessness that exists here, we feel that anything could happen,” said Dora Elena Cortes, co-winner of Mexico’s national deadline reporting award for coverage of the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in Tijuana.

“In spite of the risks, we are determined to continue working as we have been. We feel it is our obligation not to be dissuaded by any fears we might have,” said Cortes, a Tijuana correspondent for a Mexico City newspaper.

Journalists plan a protest march Saturday to condemn the shooting of Blancornelas and demand security.

The threats against the media have become intimate and close-range in this border region, where two journalists have been slain by alleged drug gunmen since 1995.

In July, an alleged drug gangster gunned down a news weekly editor, Benjamin Flores, just across the Baja California border in neighboring Sonora state, in the embattled town of San Luis Rio Colorada, which has become a fiercely contested drug crossroads.

Mexican court documents allege that the trafficker hired assassins by telephone from California.

David Barron Corona, the gunman slain in the attack on Blancornelas, grew up in San Diego and was believed to belong to the California-prison-based Mexican Mafia.

He had already allegedly taken part in the killing in 1995 of a young journalist, Dante Espartaco Cortez, who possessed damning photos of cartel members, according to U.S. court documents.

Barron, whose rap sheet warns of a “vicious and predatory nature,” had strong personal reasons to resent Blancornelas. The editor had named Barron the week before the attack as one of the gunmen who killed two Baja soldiers.

That Blancornelas, a dapper 61-year-old intellectual, should be one of the few people to survive the lethally efficient cartel death squads has added to his legend--and made the hyper-macho cartel the butt of numerous jokes.

And it has shined a spotlight on the work of a cadre of border reporters who have broken with a still widely entrenched tradition of press corruption and are going after corrupt local authorities who use money or intimidation to silence the media.

“These young journalists are going to go far,” said Jose Luis Perez Canchola, one of the most respected Baja human rights figures. “They are aggressive. They take risks. They want to legitimize their profession.

“They are not attacking just to attack, but to reveal the truth,” he said. “The press has changed a lot, and a lot of this is due to this new generation of reporters. This group that we are seeing grow here in Tijuana is a true exception to provincial Mexican journalism. It is very good for the state.”

As in Mexico City, where a tradition of aggressive journalism has grown in the past decade, the phenomenon is relatively recent in Baja California.

Twenty years ago, Blancornelas was forced into exile in San Diego for two years because of what he was publishing about authorities.

Observers link the shift to the ascendance of the opposition political movement that culminated in 1989 with the election as Baja California governor of liberal-minded Ernesto Ruffo Appel of the National Action Party.

Still, press corruption remains rife in Tijuana. Authorities regularly pay off many journalists, a practice common in Mexico. Local dailies generally adhere to well-defined political or personal power bases.

In the 1994 national elections, opposition candidates in Tijuana were irate that some local reporters demanded payment of up to $150 to publish their interviews.

The best young journalists often become local correspondents for Mexico City newspapers.

Even then, their presence provokes internal power struggles between the old guard of local newspapers and young reporters eager to join the ranks of competitive, “clean” journalists.

There are still invisible but well-known boundaries that operate much like the Tijuana “law of the Mafia.” Most risky is reporting personal details on Tijuana drug cartel members--their addresses, the names of their wives and children, or the names of their gunmen, who have emerged from some of Tijuana’s most prominent families.

In the days before the attack on Blancornelas, in its characteristic take-no-prisoners style, Zeta reported that CH--an alias of gunman Barron--had been involved in the killing, in broad daylight in downtown Tijuana, of two soldiers said to have played a role in the recent arrest of a cartel lieutenant, Arturo Paez Martinez.

On Nov. 27, Barron taped his trigger finger and donned a long-sleeved shirt in black, the customary color of choice for Tijuana assassins.

He and nine other gunmen are said to have piled into two cars--both from San Diego, one of them stolen--and intercepted Blancornelas’ vehicle as he was being driven to work. Blancornelas’ bodyguard, Luis Lauro Valero, was killed before he was able to fire back.

And as he crouched at the street corner with his assault rifle, Barron too was killed, by the frenzied cross-fire of his own fellow gunmen. They fled, abandoning his body and later the cars, leaving behind a sloppy trail of clues that made it easy to trace the crime to the cartel.

But the fact that state authorities had retired two police bodyguards assigned to Blancornelas, just three weeks before, also shined some unwelcome light on officials.

In its blistering next issue--which hit the streets a day after the shooting--Zeta demanded to know who gave the order to remove the police, and suggested that there might have been “an agreement between drug police and drug officials to open the path for the hit men.”

The top state prosecutor promptly resigned.