Enough Already With This Dictatorship Of El Mencho

"Sol Prendido" for Borderland Beat

For the avoidance of all doubt: there is, in areas of Mexico, a criminal dictatorship, as Javier Oliva, a security specialist at UNAM, says. Yes. And enough is enough.

First: the criminal threat against Azucena Uresti, host of Milenio Televisión and Radio Formula, is unacceptable.

Second: threats to comrades from El Universal, Televisa, Milenio and other media, especially reporters, cameramen and photographers sent to conflict zones, are also unacceptable.

Third: the threats to fellow correspondents, to journalists who risk their lives every day because they, unlike the envoys, do not leave the area, they always live in those areas of horror, are the most unacceptable of all intimidations. They are the most vulnerable and must be the most protected.

Fourth: I express here an unnuanced condemnation of this violence against Azucena and other colleagues. We cannot normalize these onslaughts of terror for the sake of just criticizing governments. Let's repudiate these criminals without being evasive about it. Let's isolate them.

Let's reflect: the machismo manifested in the intimidating message from the boss of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, alias "El Mencho", and the insolence that it reflects, are unprecedented: the unpunished subject says that he doesn’t mind being accused of femicide and that if necessary he will seek her underground to silence her, if she doesn’t modify the way she presents information in the positions she leads.

What a challenge to the State this must be for the type of individual who can say: "I kill whoever and wherever I want, at whatever time and whenever I want, if you don't do what my macho attitude commands. Everything is reported here as I want it to be, or it’s not reported at all," may be the translation of the message launched from somewhere in Michoacán.

What about the Michoacán government of Silvano Aureoles? It doesn't exist. What about the federal government? His contemplation of the facts is becoming a criminal omission. 

The presidential intention that the Armed Forces do not violate human rights and much less participate in massacres, to differentiate itself from the times of Calderón and Peña Nieto, is applaudable, but their astonishment at the growth of the zones of silence implanted by organized crime (those areas where freedoms have been violated), has already become unacceptable.

You must understand that in the National Palace the most serious thing about everything that is happening is that these infamous criminals are not enough now to establish zones of silence for the press, those suffered by correspondents and the local media, but they also want to dictate to us at the national level how we should give the news. 

It’s unusual and it is not permissible to give in. If journalists make a mistake in the way we present war information (yes, war between cartels); if our ego and desire gets the best of us to rate and interview a hitman who posed as a self-defense member, and therefore put our own colleagues stationed in the area at risk, it’s a matter that we must correct in order to be responsible, humble, rigorous, and verify everything.

We cannot, from our arrogance, go around distributing labels of who is a self-defense member and who is a criminal, as long as we have a note, because in wars both sides commit atrocities and always pretend to be what they are not: terrorists for guerrillas, hitmen for self-defense. 

And besides, no note is worth more than the lives of our comrades who travel those areas: compromising information should never be released if we have envoys in danger, it is only given when they are safe. But from that mea culpa to allow this criminal infamy to be produced and censored, no. Period.

El Siglo Coahuila