Editor Defied, Survived Drug Cartel

Is there anything that could persuade muckraking Tijuana journalist Jesus Blancornelas to lay down his pen?

A nearly successful assassination attempt by the Tijuana drug cartel failed to silence him. He waves away the inconvenience of life with 13 army bodyguards as just another bizarre plot twist in his episodic career.

And indeed, the bearded and bespectacled Blancornelas--with his classic khakis, crisp white shirts and dry wit--seems more like a slumming college literature professor than the editor of the city’s premier investigative journal.

Yet his gritty, take-no-prisoners reportage is legend on both sides of the border. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists once anointed him “the spiritual godfather of modern Mexican journalism.”

“Many people told me I should retire after the ‘accident,’ ” said Blancornelas, 65, employing a gentle euphemism for his near-execution. “A lot of my friends said, ‘Move to the United States and get lost.’ ”

He’s still here. Today the award-winning journalist is unveiling a story few live to tell in a new book, “The Cartel: The Arellano Felixes: The Most Powerful Mafia in the History of Latin America.”

Blancornelas still does not dare promote it publicly in Tijuana. Published in July in Spanish by Mexico City’s Plaza & Janes, Blancornelas’ book peers into the secret lives of the disco-loving Tijuana drug lords who partied their way to hegemony. But its most intriguing tale may well be that of Blancornelas.

In an era when journalism sometimes careens closer to “Hard Copy” than Watergate, Blancornelas has stubbornly made his Zeta newsweekly an indispensable institution that lends a whole new meaning to public service.

Notorious cartel gunmen might elude arrest--but not Blancornelas’ irate indictment. Gunmen find their photos staring sullenly back at them from Zeta’s cover. When Tijuana authorities fail to make sense of high-profile murders, stunned citizens turn to Zeta for an explanation.

Blancornelas abandoned his relentless coverage only once--and not voluntarily--when cartel gunmen attacked him, killing his bodyguard, Luis Valero, as they drove down a busy street at midday on Nov. 27, 1997. Blancornelas did something unheard of: He survived.

He began his next column from his convalescence bed: “Thanks to God, my faithful friend Luis Valero, and the marvels of medical science, I am alive.”

Today, Zeta is produced from a barely marked office that is a virtual safe house. On a recent sun-drenched day, a scowling tough guy parked in front of Zeta climbed out of a battered car with a missing headlight, pulling his shirt over a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. No problem: He’s one of Blancornelas’ bodyguards.

Inside, the courtly Blancornelas sits down under a poster of beatific winged cherubs, pours a visitor a cup of coffee, and talks about the days, two decades ago, when Zeta was at the forefront of a new wave of investigative journalism emerging from Mexico’s heavily censored press.

Baja California was a vanguard then of a political opposition movement--the National Action Party--that in 1989 produced modern Mexico’s first opposition governor, and today, its first opposition president, Vicente Fox.

Co-Founded Zeta in 1980

Born in San Luis Potosi in central Mexico, Blancornelas began as a sportswriter in 1955. He moved to Tijuana in 1960 and became Baja editor of El Mexicano. He said border corruption stories bounced him out of three publications before he co-founded the weekly ABC.

After ABC’s government exposes met with a hostile reception, Blancornelas fled to San Diego and co-founded Zeta with a colleague, Hector Felix Miranda, in 1980. They distributed it across the border and then reinstated themselves in Tijuana.

Five years later, Zeta broke the story of the arrival of the Arellano Felix brothers, who would become the leaders of the Tijuana drug cartel, in a cover story on a marijuana warehouse guarded by local police. Blancornelas said he did not realize its significance until plainclothes officers bought all 20,000 copies. He republished the issue--emblazoning “Censored!” on the cover--and Zeta was on the map.

Not everyone was happy about that, or with Felix Miranda’s crusading column. Zeta’s office was sprayed with bullets in 1987. Gunmen killed Felix Miranda in 1988 on his way to work. Authorities convicted two men of the murder, both security guards for the racetrack run by Jorge Hank Rhon--the Tijuana-based son of one of Mexico’s most powerful men and a frequent target of Felix Miranda’s column.

But the murder was never completely solved. Every week since, Blancornelas has run a letter signed with Felix Miranda’s name, demanding: “Jorge Hank Rhon: Why did your bodyguard assassinate me?”

Zeta won a reprieve with the 1989 groundbreaking election of an opposition Baja governor, Ernesto Ruffo Appel, whose PAN party would break the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party’s hold on national politics, but would disappoint people eager to see drug corruption curbed in Tijuana.

By 1997, drug violence was a news staple in Tijuana, with an avid following, Blancornelas noted wryly, “like sports.” In those days, there were so many prominent victims of drug murders--police chiefs, prosecutors, political party activists--that Blancornelas published occasional lists with titles such as “Organogram of Death.”

Blancornelas was assigned three state judicial police bodyguards that May. Two months later, suspected narcotics gunmen killed Benjamin Flores, the editor of a muckraking weekly in San Luis Rio Colorado, across the border from Yuma, Ariz.

But such threats failed to temper Blancornelas’ zeal when a Tijuana matron, Maria Castanos, came to his office in October 1997 to request a very strange full-page ad. Castanos had written a letter to a cartel leader, Ramon Arellano Felix, demanding to know why he had killed her two sons, who had been, she explained, his most loyal servants.

Attempted Execution

The letter “angered Ramon,” Blancornelas said. “He hated bad publicity.” Blancornelas reproduced the letter free, on the front page, in early November.

“I hope you live long enough to know how painful it is to lose children,” Castanos wrote in an angry scrawl. “P.S. You can order me killed whenever you want. I am ready to give my life.”

It was Castanos’ adult daughter who was killed, by gunmen who also wounded her baby, as she and her husband took out the trash, Blancornelas reports in his book, in an apparent violation of mafia family values that bar reprisals against uninvolved family members.

Next, Blancornelas ran a cover story on David Barron Corona, who was believed to be a link between the Mexican Mafia and the Tijuana drug cartel. Zeta doctored Barron’s grainy, low-quality portrait Warhol-style, in neon pinks and yellows.

It was not the best time to spotlight fugitive gunmen: An alleged cartel lieutenant, Arturo Paez, had just been arrested in Tijuana.

But, oddly, it was precisely at this time that Blancornelas’ state judicial police bodyguards began to refuse to report for duty, leaving Blancornelas protected only by his personal bodyguard, Luis Valero.

A week later, a dark sport utility vehicle pulled alongside Blancornelas’ car, a window rolled down and a gunman fired from the back seat. Valero ordered Blancornelas to the floor and covered him with his body.

Blancornelas--struck in the neck, lung, liver, intestines and dangerously close to his spine--managed to crawl out from under his dying bodyguard and call for help on the car’s shortwave radio.

The shooting stopped when a ricocheting bullet killed a gunman who turned out to be Barron. His fleeing brothers in arms left his body in the street.

“That’s how we knew who they were,” Blancornelas said. “It was the footprint of the Arellanos.”

At the hospital, the bishop and several priests blessed him.

“They were afraid I was going to die,” Blancornelas said. “They told me, ‘You can’t die because you have to do what you’re doing, because that is what God wishes.’ ”

He feared that if he left town, other Tijuana journalists would be cowed.

“Everyone, even the narcotics traffickers, was waiting to see what I would do,” Blancornelas said.

“If I retired, I was afraid the narcotics traffickers would feel free to do the same thing to my colleagues,” he said. “And they had killed my companero, Luis Valero. I couldn’t give him back his life, so I had to do something.”

Writing History of Cartel

Blancornelas went back to writing the history of the Tijuana drug cartel in blistering weekly installments, returning to the familiar hard-boiled style and gallows humor that give his work the flavor of a murder mystery.

“What else was I supposed to do?” he shrugged. “I wasn’t about to start writing about cooking recipes or social events.”

So Mexico City sent the 13 soldiers. The Arellano Felixes sent an emissary, Blancornelas said, in the form of a prominent Tijuana lawyer.

“They wanted me to publish something saying that it was not the Arellanos who ordered me killed,” Blancornelas said. “They said they would be careful that nothing happened to me again so they wouldn’t be blamed.”

What Blancornelas really wanted was a sit-down interview with Ramon or his brother, Benjamin Arellano Felix.

But he had been offered nothing more than cell phone communication by the time Ramon was shot by Mazatlan police in February. His brother Benjamin was captured by soldiers a month later, and a few days later, gunmen killed the attorney-emissary.

“It was all the violence that brought them down,” Blancornelas said. “Ramon was the killer of the family. When they killed him, people were relieved. The city became more tranquil.”

Zeta’s top stories--featured on its Web site, www.zetatijuana.com--are becoming a more routine mix now, of government news, politics and cultural affairs. But Blancornelas is not contemplating removing his bodyguards anytime soon. Like his readers, he will await further developments.

“The cartel is becoming more Americanized: more organized, more discreet, less scandalous,” Blancornelas said. “Everyone knows about the Arellanos. Yet if I ask you to name one American narcotics trafficker, you can’t, even though Americans distribute tons of drugs in Los Angeles.”

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Times staff researcher Robin Mayper contributed to this report.