Date: September 4, 2006 6:50:22 AM PDT
Subject: [narconews] Giordano: Another Grenade Attack Against Por Esto! Brings Out Civil Society to Defend the Newspaper
September 4, 2006
Please Distribute Widely
Dear Colleague,
Once again, the authentic journalists of Por Esto!, daily newspaper
of the Yucatán peninsula, have been attacked, and this time even more
violently. Early Friday morning, two fragmentation grenades were
thrown into the newspaper's Mérida offices, one of them exploding and
injuring several staff members and security guards. Now, another poor
Mexican state - this time, Yucatan - is on the verge of social conflict.
Al Giordano reports:
"It was the third violent attack against Por Esto! reporters in eight
days, the second in the city of Mérida, and the latest in a long
string of attempts to silence the press on Mexico's Yucatán
Peninsula. However, this time, the guilty parties overplayed their
hand. In lieu of pursuing the perpetrators, who escaped in a black
van, the state attorney general (handpicked by the governor) went and
rounded up an anthropology professor and collaborator with the
newspaper, Ricardo Delfín Quezada Domínguez of the Autonomous
University of Yucatán, and in a mockery of justice detained him for
the crime. 'He's my brother!' don Mario told Narco News as the
professor was being interrogated in jail. 'This is the man who has
denounced all the environmental crimes by the government and its oil
company!'
"The reaction by Civil Society was swift and on a scale not seen
since the 1990s when Banamex-Citibank director Roberto Hernández
Ramírez - exposed for cocaine trafficking on his lands by Por Esto! -
unsuccessfully sued the newspaper 17 times in Mexico and once in the
New York Supreme Court. In some ways it has been larger, particularly
in the media, where large dailies from Mexico City to New York, and
international press freedom organizations, that remained silent in
the face of the powerful narco-banker attacks on the paper, quickly
reported the story this time (perhaps an encouraging sign of a new
era of journalistic solidarity in Mexico and América during an hour
of moral crisis). But it was on the ground in Yucatán and in the
streets of Mérida where public outrage over the attack has boiled
over into direct action."
Read the full story in The Narco News Bulletin:
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin
Narco News is supported by:
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