Mexico City, Sep 8 (EFE).- The Committee to Protect Journalists released a report here Wednesday denouncing the Mexican government's failure to safeguard reporters amid violence comparable to that in war zones.
Mexico is one of the countries of greatest concern to the CPJ due to the high level of impunity that prevails, the executive director of the New York-based non-profit organization, Joel Simon, told MVS radio in this capital.
President Felipe Calderon's government "is being outflanked in the information war, just as it is on the streets" in the battle with drug cartels, Simon said in the preface to the report Silence or Death in Mexico's Press, posted Wednesday on CPJ's Web page.
"Plomo o plata. Lead or silver. It's a well-worn phrase in Mexico, one that's all too familiar to the country's journalists. It means, simply, we own you. Take our plata (slang for money) and publish what we tell you. Or we kill you," he wrote.
The document explains how the spread of organized crime, violence and corruption have undermined Mexicans' rights to free expression and free access to information.
"Competing criminal organizations are controlling the information agenda in many cities across Mexico," the report contends.
"The failure to prosecute the killings of journalists successfully has made Mexico the ninth-worst country in the world on CPJ's Impunity Index, which calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of the population. Mexico's low ranking puts it among conflict-ravaged countries such as Iraq and Somalia," the document says.
In statements to the Primero Noticias news program, Mike O'Connor, co-author of the report, said Wednesday that Mexico's government has proved incapable of preventing the murder and disappearance of "more than 30 journalists" in the country "just in the past four years."
"I've been a journalist for years and I'm used to viewing things with a certain amount of cynicism. I view Mexico with a lot of cynicism; I view it through a very dark lens. I don't see any way out for the government, I don't see where it's taking us," O'Connor said.
"There's impunity. Impunity is what leads to the next murder," he said, insisting that an attack on a reporter is an attack on society as a whole.
"The journalist gives you the information you need to understand your world. If your city's being eaten alive by organized crime, who's going to provide you with information about that?" he added.
The report's co-author also said he is very pessimistic about the situation in the future.
In the document, the CPJ also examines the inability of Calderon's administration and Congress to tackle this daunting problem and calls on them "to federalize crimes against freedom of expression."
"Corrupt state and local authorities remain largely in charge of fighting crimes against the press," including murders, threats and attacks targeting journalists and media outlets, the document says.
Calderon, who militarized the fight against drug cartels, needs to promptly assume responsibility for addressing the "national crisis" of violence against journalists trying to cover the drug war, the CPJ said.
It also demands legislation "that would add crimes against free expression to the federal penal code, and make federal authorities responsible for investigating and prosecuting attacks on the press."
The CPJ's report comes two weeks after the United Nations' and Organization of American States' rapporteurs for freedom of expression ripped the government over the "general impunity" that exists in Mexico regarding killings of journalists and demanded protection for members of the media.
U.N. special rapporteur Frank La Rue and his OAS counterpart, Catalina Botero, who spent 16 days in Mexico gathering information about threats to journalists, reviewed their findings at the conclusion of their visit to the country on Aug. 24.
The U.N. and OAS officials visited several parts of Mexico and said they found "communities totally paralyzed" in the face of intimidation by organized crime groups.
The states most affected - Chihuahua, Coahuila, Tamaulipas and Sinaloa in the north, Durango in central Mexico, and Michoacan and Guerrero, both in the south - are those with the largest presence of organized crime groups.
About 28,000 people have died in drug-related violence since President Felipe Calderon deployed tens of thousands of soldiers and federal police to drug war hotspots shortly after taking office in December 2006.
