Eight journalists have been kidnapped in a Mexican border city in a two-week span in a wave of abductions unprecedented in the Western Hemisphere, the Inter-American Press Association said on Wednesday.
The press group said only three of the journalists kidnapped between Feb. 18 and Wednesday last week in Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, have reappeared alive. It said one died of apparent torture, two were released alive and five remain missing.
“The Mexican government must act with urgency and with due force to rescue these journalists alive,” International Au Pair Association (IAPA) president Alejandro Aguirre said.
Aguirre called the abductions “serious and without precedent in the Western Hemisphere.”
The abductions were apparently carried out by drug gangs in the Gulf coast state of Tamaulipas, where Reynosa is located.
State prosecutors in Tamaulipas and the federal attorney general’s office in Mexico City could not immediately confirm the report.
The press association said those close to the victims had been too afraid to report the abductions. The reporters work for print, radio and other media outlets.
Reynosa and several other cities in Tamaulipas have suffered a wave of shootouts attributed to turf battles between the powerful Gulf drug cartel and their former allies, a gang of hit men known as the Zetas.
The press group cited “IAPA sources who declined to name the victims or file formal complaints with the authorities out of fear of retaliation or further endangering the victims’ lives.”
The level of intimidation has been such that most of the Reynosa kidnappings had not been reported in the local media.
The Mexico City newspaper Milenio reported one of the few accounts of the abductions — but in an opinion column, not a news story. The column said one of its reporters and a cameraman had been briefly abducted in Reynosa and released.
The two Milenio journalists left Reynosa and, according to a column signed by Ciro Gomez Leyva, “they have decided that nothing more should be known or told ... and we obeyed.”
The column said the kidnappers appeared to be “hit men,” the common term for cartel gunmen, and that they had told the reporters: “Don’t come and stir things up on our turf.”
The column concluded: “Journalism is dead in Reynosa.”
The rest of the column was left blank.
Several international media watchdog groups have named Mexico the most dangerous country in the Americas for journalists. Some Mexican media outlets have toned down their coverage of drug gang violence — or stopped reporting on it altogether — out of security concerns.
At least three Mexican journalists have been officially confirmed as killed so far this year, and 12 reporters were killed in Mexico last year.
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