CNI Releases Files on Murders and Cover-Ups of 10 Mexican Journalists During ‘Dirty War’ Period ~ Borderland Beat

Since last year, the Historical Clarification Mechanism (MEH) of the Commission for Access to the Truth, created by the Mexican government, has established that several files of murdered journalists that had been transferred to the AGN in 2002 and were in various catalogues had disappeared. The same happened with files of some opposition politicians: they were in indexes, but could not be found physically.

“The Gato”

Hector “El Gato” Félix Miranda.

“This evening at around 09:50, the co-director of the newspaper ZETA was murdered with a 12-caliber shotgun. He wrote in the column ‘Something small’, in which he was very notorious for his criticism, sometimes using foul language, and even making comments and criticisms about the private lives of those he criticized,” the report said.

Intelligence agents agreed with the words of Jesús Blancornelas, director of Zeta. He believed that although the crime had the characteristics of drug trafficking, this could be used to divert attention from the real reason for the crime.

“Someone or some people could say that what happened was a consequence of his way of writing… The way he was killed gives the characteristics of a drug mafia crime, but that would be as absurd as his murder in this area. It could be that the classic system was used to divert the investigation and cover it up with the argument that it would be impossible to clarify it immediately and in the future, as has happened with other crimes of the same procedure,” said Blancornelas, who died in 2006.

Later, the intelligence center indicated that Medina Moreno’s defense was paid for by the politician and businessman and “he has been fully committed to officially demonstrating that Eng. Jorge Hank Rhon is not the material author of the murder of Héctor Félix Miranda.”

On December 13, 1979, the body of journalist Alberto Rodríguez Torres was found on the streets of Pachuca, Hidalgo. He had bruises on his scalp. The directors of three local newspapers published a letter to then-president José López Portillo to clarify the crime and protect journalistic work. The murder of Rodríguez Torres remains unpunished.

On May 31, 1984, journalist Javier Juárez Vázquez, who edited the independent magazine Primera Plana in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, was shot four times with a .45-caliber bullet, beaten, and tied up with cables. An intelligence agent wrote that the perpetrators and masterminds were a group of state police officers, the mayor of Coatzacoalcos, and a leader of the oil workers’ union, who had threatened him because of criticisms he had made of them in their newspaper.

On July 17, 1986, Ernesto Flores Torrijos, director of the newspaper El Popular in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and reporter Norma Alicia Moreno Figueroa were gunned down as they parked outside the newsroom. At the time, the Matamoros Journalists Association launched a petition to the government of President Miguel de la Madrid to resolve the case.

On October 7, 1986, journalist Odilón López Urías was driving with his wife and daughter in a car through Culiacán, Sinaloa, when they were stopped by a group of eight armed men. They were left on the road; he was kidnapped. His body was found two days later in a vacant lot in Guamúchil, Sinaloa. He had two gunshot wounds to the chest.

On July 14, 1988, two men arrived at the offices of the newspaper El Mundo in Comitán, Chiapas, asking for the director, journalist Ronay González Reyes. When the assistant led them to the press room where the director was, the men opened fire and killed him.

In the early hours of December 23, 1989, Elvira Marcelo Esquivel, a reporter for the newspaper El Día, was walking with two colleagues in Mexico City after celebrating a posada. They were on their way home when a group of five local police officers, presumably drunk, approached them and attempted to rob them.