Posted on 03/12/2010 7:46:43 AM PST by La Lydia
A powerful drug cartel is buying off journalists in northern Mexico to work as spies and smother coverage of a spike in killings on the U.S. border...Hitmen from the Gulf cartel are paying reporters around $500 a month and showering them with liquor and prostitutes to intimidate and silence colleagues at radio stations and newspapers in towns near the Laredo-Brownsville area, journalists and editors say.
A turf war that has erupted over the past three weeks around the manufacturing city of Reynosa has gone almost completely unreported despite more than 100 deaths, in a news blackout made more notable by the intense media coverage of other drug war flashpoints around the country...
For years, ill-paid Mexican reporters have occasionally been forced by cartel gunmen to take money to report favorably on traffickers or hush up killings, but the Gulf cartel now appears able to impose an almost total muzzle on reporting violence from Nuevo Laredo to Matamoros.
Reporters at news radio stations and dailies including El Manana and La Prensa say they have little choice but to ignore the fight over smuggling routes that has broken out between the Gulf gang and its former armed wing the "Zetas."
"Our newsrooms have been infiltrated by these reporters, they monitor what we write, they know where we live. With this system, the narcos have direct control over us," said a local newspaper editor who declined to be named...
Many of the rogue journalists do little to hide their dealings with traffickers and have been seen arriving at news conferences or crime scenes in flashy new SUVs...
One reporter in the border town of Nuevo Progreso said his job involved talking cash from corrupt local police in the pay of the Gulf cartel and distributing it to local reporters...
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
A powerful political cartel is buying off journalists in northern America to work as spies and smother coverage of a spike in anti-constitutional actions in the Congress.
The difference is, I believe, that the US journalists do it for free.
Time to grab the dog-eared notebook and porkpie hat, work on a Matt Drudge impersonation, and book a flight down Mexico way for a nice summer vacation.
I don’t think $500 is enough to swim with those sharks, but maybe it is in Mexico.
Just wonder how much the cartels are paying off the US media....McCain/Grahamnesty.....the La Raza/Hispanic Ku Klux Klan groups....to push the cartels agenda.
Illegal Alien Amnesty and Open Borders are big pluses for Mexican cartels to move their drugs into the US
Looks like the Mexican journalists got tired of being murdered and decided to sell out. I wonder how many of our own have done the same sell out to the cartels?
I would shut down the border there.
Don't bet on it! Research Julius and Armand Hammer, The Schulzebergers (Publishers of the NY Times and affiliates) and Al Gore, Sr. & Jr. It is unreasonable to think those are the only ones taken over by the Communists beginning in 1907.
More today from NAFBPO about journalists in Mexico.
La Cronica (Mexicali, Baja Calif.) 3/10/10
Criminals muzzle the press
Eight Mexican reporters have been kidnapped during the last two weeks in the city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas (across the Rio Grande River from McAllen, TX.) The Inter-American Press Society is labeling this “a grave act and without precedent in the western hemisphere.” Three of the journalists have been released, though one died due to the torture inflicted on him. Five others are still missing. [For some time now, M3Report has noticed that some papers in that area have abstained from reporting events related to criminal activity in their home territory.]
http://m3report.wordpress.com/2010/03/11/monetary-remittance-figures-for-2009/
We should recruit the drug gangs for our newsrooms.
The Southern border is a war zone. The sooner we realize that , the less innocent people will die.
Time to arm up... like the media would report that and why.
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