Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

MEXICO: Vigilante Group Threatens to Kill ‘One Criminal a Day’

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Jan 23 2009 (IPS) - A supposed new paramilitary group’s threat to kill a criminal every 24 hours in Ciudad Juárez has further fanned the flames of the violence in that border city, which gained notoriety over the past decade and a half for the hundreds of unsolved murders of young women and has more recently seen an increase in drug-related murders.

Ciudad Juárez, where 83 people have already been killed this year and more than 1,600 were murdered in 2008, and the northern state where it is located, Chihuahua, are the most violent areas of Mexico, due to the turf wars waged there by rival drug cartels.

Of the more than 5,500 drug-related murders reported last year in Mexico, 2,400 occurred in Chihuahua.

“We are living in hell here. The politicians, police and military are inept or corrupt, and the few that aren’t end up being gobbled up by the rotten ones,” José Bernal, who runs a toy store in Ciudad Juárez, told IPS.

“If this business about a group emerging to put some order here by eliminating killers is true, as a family man and a father of young children, I would even support them, and I know a lot of people around here think that way too,” Bernal said by telephone from that city along the U.S. border, which has a population of 1.6 million.

Last week, several media outlets in the city received an email announcing that “a group of citizens fed up for years with the level of impunity in this city have founded the Juárez Citizen Commando,” which said it would kill one criminal every day.

The message from the supposed death squad said it was financed by members of the business community who have been affected by violent crime. But the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial de Juárez, the local business association, denied that.

Authorities have not ruled out the possibility that there is no such vigilante group and that the emails were merely a prank.

Political scientist Sergio Fernández, an expert on drug trafficking issues, told IPS that the announcement should be investigated, because if it turns out to be true, the group could have real support from businesses and even local authorities, “but we would thus lose more than we already have in terms of security,” he said.

According to academics, 98 percent of crimes in Mexico go unreported or unsolved.

“Paramilitarism is a cancer as bad as drug trafficking, and it should be fought by the state – or by what is left of the state in a city like Juárez,” said the analyst.

Until now, the presence of paramilitary groups was limited to the southern state of Chiapas, where according to human rights organisations they sporadically harass and attack sympathisers and supporters of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), a barely-armed indigenous insurgent group that basically governs a number of villages in remote mountain and jungle areas in that impoverished state.

Tired of the violence in Ciudad Juárez, groups of local residents have rented billboard space in the city calling for prayers for peace, and have held protests and demonstrations for more effective law enforcement action.

The local government led by Mayor José Reyes of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) – which ruled Mexico from 1929-2000 – says it is doing everything possible to make the city safe, with the police working together with more than 2,000 army troops sent there by President Felipe Calderón to fight drug trafficking.

In two of the latest incidents of violence, the decapitated head of a police chief who had been kidnapped along with several of his officers a few days earlier was found in an ice chest on Jan. 18 in a village near Ciudad Juárez, and three more heads were found in a cooler in the central square of another village on Jan. 20.

Based on news reports, local newspapers counted 83 murders in the city between Jan. 1 and 22.

A new report, “Periodismo bajo la violencia del narcotráfico, 2008” (roughly, “journalism under drug trafficking violence, 2008”), states that “Chihuahua has become the most dangerous part of Mexico for journalists to work.”

“As witnesses to the war between cartels and operations by the security forces, journalists and the media have been attacked by the dark forces of the drug trafficking trade,” adds the report, released Thursday by the Centre for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET).

“But abuses have also come from within the ranks of the federal and municipal police and the military, in new and unusual shapes and forms,” says the report, which was produced with the support of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX).

“The gravity of the situation is such that some reporters and photographers wear bullet-proof vests, and the media have opted to refrain from providing adequately in-depth or broad coverage of killings and other crimes involving organised crime. Despite all of this, the journalist’s job remains highly dangerous,” the report says.

One of the latest attacks on journalists was the Nov. 13 shooting death of police reporter Armando Rodríguez in Ciudad Juárez.

Most of the media outlets in the city have modified their editorial policy to avoid problems.

Some newspapers stopped using bylines or photos, to protect the identity of reporters, others have begun rotating journalists on police reporting duties, while some have stopped covering certain events and developments.

Since 1993, Ciudad Juárez has become internationally renowned for the murders of hundreds of young women, most of whose bodies showed signs of torture, rape or mutilation.

But now the overall number of murders has increased, to a total of 1,600 – mainly male victims, including 75 police officers – last year, prompting increased calls by the public for effective action against violent crime.