H.E. Felipe Calderon
President
Residencia Official de los Pinos
Col. San Miguel Chapultepec
11850 Mexico, DF
Mexico
Fax: (011.52.5) 515.5729
Your Excellency:
Overseas Press Club of America wishes to express its deep concern over the continued escalating level of violence and murder against working journalists in Mexico. When we wrote to you on February 28 of this year, we noted that three journalists had been murdered just since the start of the year, that two others were in hiding, and that a sixth had been the victim of an assassination attempt.
We must now add to the list, the April 7 ambush murders of 22-year-old Felicitas Martinez and 24-year-old Teresa Bautista. Both were reporters for Radio Copala, a new community radio station serving the newly created autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala. According to Human Rights Watch, the young women were shot to death on a rural road in their township. In this remote mountainous region, the two reporters were broadcasting four hours a day with messages on health and education and staying away from commenting on the many political and clan divisions among Triqui communities in the area, which often inflame passions.
As Reporters Without Borders (RSF) stated in its report on this case, whether the reporters were murdered because of their work as journalists or as the result of belonging to a new political region opposed by leaders in the Mexican state of Oaxaca is not clear. But since they were community journalists, their killings have a chilling effect on the development of community radio stations in Latin America, which, as RSF observed, “are too often ignored or despised by the rest of the media and by governments.”
These killings come amid continued police harassment of more established Mexican journalists. On May 6, four reporters from “El Debate” newspaper covering police at an anti-narcotics check-point manned by the Federal Preventive Policy (PFP) forces in the city of Culiacan, were driven off at gunpoint by Federal police after one began taking photographs. According to IFEX, the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, the photographer, Torivio Bueno, was later taken by another group of federal police to a patrol car where “they beat him and verbally abused him in a very aggressive manner” before putting him on the street.
As you know, Mexico’s constitution grants full freedom of expression and full press protection to journalists with the purpose of creating an informed public. We presume that professional reporting on your government’s war on drug cartels and embedded corruption is important to your mission. But it is also dangerous work. Showing young reporters that the killers of community journalists like Felicitas Martinez and Teresa Bautista will be swiftly dealt with is one of the most important ways to provide them with the courage they will need to pursue their careers.
Respectfully yours,
Robert Dowling
Larry Martz
Freedom of the Press Committee
cc:
Hon. Eduardo Medina-Mora
Icaza Attorney General
Avenida Paseo de la Reforma, Nos. 211-213
Mexico, DF, C.P.
06500 Mexico
Olga María del Carmen Sánchez
Ministra Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación Pino Súarez, No.2 Colonia Centro,
México, DF México
Fax: (011.525.55) 522.0152
Genaro David Góngora
Pimentel Ministro Presidente Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación
Pino Súarez, No.2, Colonia Centro México,
DF México
Fax: (011.525.55) 522.0152
Arturo Sarukhan Casamitjana
Ambassador of Mexico to the U.S.A.
Embassy of Mexico
1911 Pennsylvania Avenue,
NW Washington, DC 20006
Fax: (202) 728.1698
Ambassador Claude Heller
Permanent Representative
Permanent Mission of Mexico to the United Nations 2
United Nations Plaza, 28th Floor
New York, NY 10017
Fax: (212) 688.8862
Antonio O. Garza, Jr.
U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Embassy of the United States of America
P.O. Box 9000
Brownsville, TX 78520
Fax: (011.52.55) 5080.2005
Lcda. Rosario Robles
Presidenta Partido de la Revolución Democrática Huatusco # 37, 5o. piso
Col. Roma Sur México, D.F.
Fax: (011.52.55) 5207.1200
New York City Independent Media Center
4 West 43rd Street, Suite 311
New York, NY 10036
Patricia Mercado Sanchez
Editor
El Economista Mexico
DF Mexico
pmercado@economista.com.mx
Leonardo Valero
Editor – International La Reforma Mexico,
DF Mexico
Leonardo.valero@reforma
Juan Francisco Ealy Ortiz
El Universal of Mexico City
Bucareli N° 8,
Col. Centro Delegación Cuauhtémoc, C.P. 06040
México
Ramón Darío Cantú Deándar
El Maňana Mexico
Fax: (011.52.5) 714.8797
Carmen Lira Saade
La Jornada Av. Cuauhtémoc 1236,
Col. Santa Cruz Atoyac México DF, C.P. 03310
México
Alberto Ibargüen
Miami Herald Publishing Company
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132