Criminal insurgency strikes Mexican media

Houston Chronicle:

Assassins gunned down a Mexican crime reporter Thursday morning in the violence-racked border city of Ciudad Juarez.

Armando Rodriguez, 40, a reporter for El Diario newspaper in the city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, was killed as he left his house to drive one of his three children to school and head for work.

"So far there is no indication of the motives," El Diario reported on its Web site shortly after Rodriguez was slain.

Gangland violence has killed more than 1,000 people in the city of 1.2 million this year, the highest death toll of anywhere in the country awash in such bloodshed.

Rodriguez had covered crime in Juarez for more than two decades, most of those years with El Diario, the city's leading newspaper.

Amid a government crackdown on organized crime and brutal fighting among warring gangs, Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. In the past eight years, 24 journalists have been killed in Mexico and another seven are missing, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Those killed include freelancer Brad Will, who was shot in 2006 while covering civil protests in Oaxaca state. San Antonio Express-News correspondent Philip True was slain while on a 1998 vacation hike in the rugged mountains near Guadalajara. But his convicted killers' motives remain unclear.

"The unprecedented wave of violence against the Mexican press must be halted immediately," Carlos Lauria, the organization's coordinator for the Americas, said in a statement. "Mexico needs to break the cycle of impunity in crimes against journalists." The underworld feuding has claimed more than 4,000 lives so far this year, and nearly 6,000 since President Felipe Calderon unleashed the army and federal police against the narcotics gangsters upon taking office two years ago.

The violence has fallen particularly heavily on local Mexican media working on the border and in other areas rattled by the drug violence.

"The climate is really, really tense, and journalists are really scared," Lauria said in a telephone interview.

...

The criminal insurgents are terrorist and terrifying the media is an effective way to spread terror to the general population. In terms of the overall demographics the media killings are not as large as the law enforcement killings. The biggest demographic in the death count is drug dealers killed by competitors.

Mexico urgently needs to develop a counterinsurgency force that can protect the people. This will yield intelligence on the where to find the criminal insurgents and make it easier prevent their movement within the Mexican communities. While the military has had some effect on the insurgents, they still do not have an adequate force to space ratio which leaves them to play whack-a-mole with the bad guys.

The death toll in Juarez is probably greater than Baghdad at this point. There is a full fledged criminal insurgency going on in Mexico and it needs to be treated as such.

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