UPDATE: More death threats to border reporters before Rodriguez buried 

FronteraNorte Sur reports in "A Border Press Emergency," that the threats to border reporters continues. There were even death threats to others before Armando Rodriguez was buried.

"Even before murdered El Diario de Juarez reporter Armando Rodriguez was buried last week, more Ciudad Juarez journalists reported getting death threats. In one case, the director of a popular online news site took the threats so seriously he immediately left behind his property, packed up the family and fled to the United States.

"According to the Mexico City-based Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET), Jorge Luis Aguirre, director of the La Polaka news service, received a call on his cell phone last Thursday, one day after Rodriguez’s murder, which warned the news manager that he 'was the next in line.'" Read article.

By Brenda Norrell

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- News reporter Armando Rodriguez was the fifth reporter murdered in Mexico this year, and the 20th news reporter murdered in Mexico since 2000, when he was gunned down as he took his child to school on Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008. These numbers increase when the number of independent journalists murdered are added to the list of media assassinated in Mexico.

Rodriguez, a reporter for El Diario, the largest privately-owned daily in Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, was shot dead outside his home.

Reporters without Borders said, "Rodriguez, aged 40, became the latest victim in a bloody war between the country’s major drug cartels which is centred on Ciudad Juarez, in Chihuahua State, with more than 1,300 casualties since the start of the year."

Rodriguez, a crime specialist for the past 14 years, was leaving his home to drive his eight year old daughter to school when an unidentified gunman ambushed and shot him dead at point blank range before running to a nearby vehicle where accomplices were waiting, Reporters without Borders said.

Editor of El Diario, Pedro Torres, told Reporters Without Borders that Rodriguez had received a threatening message on his mobile phone in February 2008 telling him to “tone it down." As a result, he was transferred to El Paso for two months for his safety but on his return he had insisted on resuming work without any special protection.

“First of all we want to voice our solidarity with Armando Rodriguez’s family in their grief for this vile crime that plunges Mexico yet further into the terror of the war of the cartels,” the organization said. “This crime specialist was in the front line of this savage conflict, which has made Mexico one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists”.

“We welcome the authorities’ decision to take on this case through the federal prosecutor’s office. We hope that the inquiry will swiftly identify the killers and those who sent them, thus showing the government’s determination to effectively fight the impunity that sadly so often prevails in Mexico”, it concluded.

Carlos Huerta Munoz, a reporter on the local daily El Norte, pointed out that Rodriguez had on the previous day reported on the killing of two local police officers. A severed head had also been found on November 6, on a monument in the Journalist’s Square in the centre of Ciudad Juarez, which the city’s media took to be a direct threat against them.

There were at least three homicides on Thursday in El Paso, including the murder of police inspector Miguel Carlos Herrera Gonzalez. He was fatally shot soon after his shift ended in the morning. Herrera is the fourth law-enforcement officer killed the same week. The Mexican attorney general's office said the case has been handed over to a federal task force investigating crimes against journalists, according to the El Paso Times.

Among those carrying out the murders are the Zetas. The death squads of the Zetas, trained at the US School of the Americas, are carrying out the executions for Mexican drug cartels and are hired as killers in Iraq.

The number of reporters murdered this year is even higher than reports show, because of those murdered in the independent media.

In April, two Indigenous Triqui women who worked at the community radio station La Voz que Rompe el Silencio, "The Voice that Breaks the Silence," in the autonomous municipality of San Juan Copala of the Mixteca region, were murdered on their way to Oaxaca city to participate in the State Forum for the Defense of the Rights of the Peoples of Oaxaca. Three other people were injured. Teresa Bautista Merino, 24, and Felícitas Martínez Sánchez, 20, were shot and killed.

The women had departed from the radio station, which is part of the Network of Indigenous Community Radio Stations of the Southeast (Red de Radios Comunitarias Indígenas del Sureste), around 1:00 PM. They were travelling in a truck on their way to Oaxaca city, and were ambushed on the outskirts of the community Llano Juarez, according to independent media reports.

Two journalists were murdered in Oaxaca during a major wave of protests against state governor Ulíses Ruiz Ortíz in 2006. Indymedia reporter and U.S. citizen Bradley Will, and Raúl Marcial Pérez, an Indigenous community leader and columnist for the regional daily El Gráfico, were murdered.

Less than a month ago, in Oaxaca, Reporters without Borders, reported the abduction and torture of reporter Pedro Matías Arrazola of the local daily Noticias de Oaxaca and the national weekly Processo. Matias was beaten and psychologically tortured for about 12 hours on the night of 25 October in the southern city of Oaxaca before being dumped outside the city.

In October, Reporters without Borders, reported the abduction and murder of Miguel Angel Villa Gómez Valle, the editor of Noticias de Michoacán, a daily newspaper based in Lázaro Cárdenas, in the southwestern state of Michoacán. Villa Gómez’s bullet-riddled body was found Oct. 10 in a refuse dump, less than 12 hours after he went missing.

“The list of kidnappings and execution-style killings of journalists continues to grow longer in areas of Mexico where organised crime is well-established,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Our thoughts go out to the victim’s family and colleagues, whose grief will only be compounded if this murder goes unpunished."

The police found Villa Gómez’s body in a road-side refuse dump about 50 km outside Lázaro Cárdenas. He had been shot twice in the stomach and once in the head. Relatives told Agence France-Presse that he left his office at about 10 p.m. on Oct. 9 with the intention of going home. He had not mentioned getting any threats. His newspaper is a regional tabloid that often carries stories linked to corruption, organised crime and drug trafficking.

On September 23, a radio show host was gunned down by a person driving a tuck with Texas license plates in Tabasco. Alejandro Xenón Fonseca Estrada, a program host for a local radio station, EXA FM in Villahermosa, the capitol of the southeastern state of Tabasco, was murdered.

Authorities did not contact the radio station immediately after the murder. Fonseca, 33, hosted a morning show on EXA FM called “El Padrino” (The Godfather) and he was widely known by the nickname of “Padrino Fonseca.” He was also an activist who campaigned against organised crime and headed an NGO.

"On the evening of his murder, he was on the streets with a loudspeaker and, together with several colleagues, was putting up stickers criticising abductions," Reporters without Borders said. He was at the intersection of two avenues at about 9 p.m. when a pickup with a Texan licence plate pulled up alongside him. "The passengers in the cabin asked him what he was doing with his stickers. Then they opened fire and then drove off. Hit in the chest, Fonseca died after being rushed to the city’s Los Angeles hospital."

The staff of EXA FM said they were unaware of any prior threats against Fonseca, who started his programme in 2001 on Radio Tabasco before moving with it to EXA FM. He also participated in a local TV programme. His colleagues said “El Padrino,” which was about social issues and had many listeners, might not survive his death as he was its “soul.”

Abductions, disappearances and murders of journalists are common in this part of Mexico. Mauricio Estrada Zamora of the regional daily La Opinión de Apatzingán has been missing since February 12. Gerardo Israel García Pimentel of the daily La Opinión de Michoacán was gunned down on December 8, 2007 in Uruapan.

During the past two years, José Antonio García Apac, the editor of the weekly Ecos de la Cuenca, was among the disappeared.  He was last seen on 20 November 2006 near Tepalcatepec, as he was about to set off for his home in Morelia, the capital of Michoacán. The police investigation into his disappearance drew a blank. Freelance photographer Jaime Arturo Olvera Bravo, a former employee of La Voz de Michoacán, was killed on March 9, 2006 in La Piedad.

Michel Marizco, reporting from Mexico in the Border Reporter, said, "Five journalists have now been murdered in Mexico this year and one has gone missing, says Carlos Lauria with the The New York-based, Committee to Protect Journalists."