Organised crime muzzles freedom of expression

IN Media Freedom | 01/03/2011
Mafias and cartels today pose the biggest threat to media freedom worldwide,
severely compromising the safety of journalists and the fourth estate’s investigative ability, says a special report from RSF (Reporters Sans Frontieres)

'Organized crime: muscling in on the media’ is an inquiry report from the international journalists organisation Reporters Sans Frontieres(Reporters without borders). With the help of its local correspondents and by interviewing journalists and media observers in every continent, Reporters Without Borders has tried to describe the obstacles and challenges that organized crime poses to the media, which are often reduced to covering this complex issue in terms of shootouts and bloodshed, or to just counting the dead in their own ranks.

It is clear from this report that the media are not united against organized crime, their correspondents are isolated and lack resources, and their capacity for investigative reporting is eclipsed by the race for breaking news. Without claiming to offer definitive solutions to this enormous problem, Reporters Without Borders recommends pooling information and sources, and calls for the creation of journalists' associations that can help to guarantee the independence of their media and prevent murky financial interests from influencing editorial choices.

Here are some excerpts:

Summary

A total of 141 journalists and media workers were killed during the decade of the 2000s in attacks and reprisals blamed on criminal groups. Mafias and cartels today pose the biggest threat to media freedom worldwide. A transnational phenomenon, organized crime is more than the occasional bloody shoot-out or colourful crime story in the local paper.

It is a powerful parallel economy with enormous influence over the legal economy, one the media have a great deal of difficulty in covering. Its elusiveness and inaccessibility to the media make it an even greater threat, both to the safety of journalists and to the fourth estate’s investigative ability.

Organized crime" is the generic label that the post-Cold War world has given to these new predators of journalism. Mafias, cartels, warlords recycled as traffickers, paramilitaries running rackets, separatist groups that traffic and extort to fund themselves – they have replaced the world’s remaining dictatorial regimes as the biggest source of physical danger to journalists.

From newspapers to TV news, from crime reports to yellow press, the media seem to be reduced to counting the number of dead, including the dead
within their own ranks. While organized crime often overlaps with a violent criminality consisting of rackets, kidnapping and murder, it is the expression of an economic and geopolitical reality that the media usually do not reflect, a reality that does not admit analysis of the types of criminal organizations involved, the way they operate and their ramifications.

This dimension of organized crime, which is completely beyond the scope of the 24-hour news cycle, also includes its impact on the "legal world" and its various components, including the media.

Far from wanting to overthrow the political, economic and media bases of societies, organized crime has every interest in participating in them and using them. This fundamental fact suggests that the media are vulnerable not just as victims but also as actors or cogs of a parallel system for which they can serve as information and public relations outlets.

Criminal hot-house

The media can barely survive when they are directly targeted by criminal organizations. The emblematic example is Mexico, which has been enduring a federal offensive by 50,000 soldiers against the drug cartels since December 2006, as well as bloody turf wars among the cartels themselves.

Around 35,000 people have been killed in this undeclared war, including more than 15,000 in 2010 alone. The Pacific cartel, Gulf cartel, Michoacán’s Familia, Sinaloa cartel and Los Zetas are the leading players in this criminal hot-house
which could not have prospered without a generalized decay in the Mexican state, the complicity of many officials and the lack of an adequate international
response to the trafficking problem.

"The mere fact of being known to be journalists puts us in danger," we were told by a journalist in Ciudad Juárez, one of the epicentres of the federal offensive. "Either we are tortured and killed or we live under a permanent threat, not so much because of what we report, since there is so much self-censorship, but because of what we know or what we are assumed to know."

Shootings, decapitations, sometimes a military counterattack, less often a significant seizure – such is the daily fare of the media in the provinces
– when they are not being directly attacked themselves. Obliged to chase after the news and constantly exposed to danger, most journalists do not succeed in providing anything more than quick and superficial coverage that is often third-rate.

"In these conditions, it is impossible to do an analysis or in-depth treatment of crime and drugtrafficking," said Claudia Méndez of> El Periódico, one of the leading dailies in Guatemala, where the "Mexican effect" now compounds the more traditional violence inherited from the civil wars. "All the media do is just react to shootouts," she added.

In Guatemala and Colombia, an armed group is is not necessarily disarmed when it is "demobilized." Death squads and some guerrilla groups have transformed themselves into criminal organizations, fighting for the control of various kinds of trafficking, doing contract work for the major cartels and corrupting underpaid policemen and soldiers. In the last third of 2010, 8 per cent of Mexico’s federal police were dismissed on suspicion of complicity with drug traffickers.

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