The Demise of Mexican News Reporting in the Age of Drug Cartel Censorship Dana Priest - Independent
go to original January 10, 2016

Hildebrando "Brando" Deandar's family has been in Northern Mexico's journalism business for nearly 100 years. But in the last ten years, one beat has become a potentially fatal task: reporting on the country's savage drug cartels. (Washington Post)

Enlaces, or “links” to the cartel, are part of the deeply institutionalized system of cartel censorship imposed on media outlets in northeastern Mexico abutting the border of Texas. How it works is an open secret in newsrooms here but not among readers. They are unaware of the life-and-death decisions editors make every day not to anger different local cartel commanders, each of whom has his own media philosophy.

Submitting to cartel demands is the only way to survive, said Hildebrando “Brando” Deandar Ayala, 39, editor in chief of El Mañana, one of the oldest and largest newspapers in the region with a print circulation of 30,000. “You do it or you die, and nobody wants to die,” he said. “Auto censura — self-censorship — that’s our shield.”

Readers get angry when they don’t get the news they need, he said. Resentment against El Mañana grew so strong two years ago that reporters took the logos off their cars and stopped carrying their identification on assignments.

“The readers hate us sometimes,” Deandar said. “But they don’t know the real risks we go through.”

Mexico has long been a deadly place for reporters. Some 88 journalists have been slain in the last two decades, according to Article 19, a worldwide advocacy group that promotes press freedom.

With its endless drug wars, Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in a world that has seen a recent upswing in violence against journalists, with scores of reporters killed or jailed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Arab Spring countries, Central America and the former Soviet bloc.

Read the rest at Independent

Related: Why Many Consider Sean Penn’s ‘El Chapo’ Meeting an ‘Epic Insult’ to Mexican Journalists (The Washington Post)

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