The LA Times reports about El Mañana, a border newspaper with staffers in Mexico and the US, and its decision to fall silent about drug-related violence:
Newspapers all along the border face a similar challenge in reporting cartel violence. A dozen Mexican journalists disappeared from 2006 to 2012 and an additional 14 were killed, according to a report earlier this year by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Mexico’s human rights commission says 81 journalists have been killed since 2000. Last month, some journalists created an interactive map to track such attacks.
At El Mañana, the decision to self-censor went against family tradition. Cantú’s grandfather started the newspaper about 90 years ago as the people’s paper, calling it El Mañana — literally “tomorrow,” or metaphorically, “the future.” Over the years, El Mañana’s slogan became “La verdad sin fronteras,” or “The truth without borders.” The paper has a staff of 20 in Laredo and 200 across the border, with a total circulation of 16,000, and 40,000 daily visitors online. For decades it had covered the rise of Mexican drug cartels.
That began to change in 2004, when editor Roberto Mora García, 42, was killed on his way home from work in Nuevo Laredo, stabbed more than two dozen times.
Then things escalated:
Two years later, armed men shot up the Nuevo Laredo office, leaving a reporter paralyzed. Afterward, the paper installed bulletproof glass and fortified walls.
A year ago this month, men again shot into the office with assault rifles and tossed a homemade grenade into the building.
No one was injured, but that was the last straw. The paper published an editorial that said it would “abstain, for as long as necessary, from publishing any information that is related to violent conflicts which our city and other regions of the country suffer from” because of “lack of conditions to freely exercise journalism.”
If knowing is half the battle, we’re losing the whole war.
