PrintAugust 1, 2010
Unidentified reporter admits 'there is total control' of news about drug violence at the border
The free press has all but disappeared. The news is often little more than a means of controlling the message. Entire areas of the country have experienced an information blackout. Many frightened citizens rely on bloggers, face book, twitter and text messages as their only source of news and information. Open warfare rages below the Rio Grande.
The Houston Chronicle reports that.
After years of relative calm, the gangland nightmare is back-and yet, barely a single mention of the clashes here has been made by local radio and television or newspapers. The city's journalists, having lost some of their own and seen their colleagues across the country killed or kidnapped, have been silenced for fear of their lives.
"Nowhere is the media controlled more than it is here," said one reporter, who stressed he would face serious danger if identified. "There is total control."
In border towns like Nuevo Laredo, Matamoros, Reynosa and numerous others, gun battles between the military and the powerful Zetas and the Gulf Cartel have been fought around the clock during the past week. Officials at all levels of the government have offered little if any information to a frightened citizenry amid the media blackout. One local businessman remarked that "before the news was alarmist; now there's no information at all."
Now, journalists say all the local news outlets get constant messages-sometimes from colleagues working for the gangsters-ordering which events are to be covered and those that are not.
The local media have little choice but to comply with the demands of the powerful cartels or face the bloody consequences.
Four journalists were kidnapped Monday in the city of Gomez Palacios, another northern city battered by gang warfare. Gangsters demanded that television stations broadcast videos favorable to them in exchange for the journalists' lives. The station complied, but the men had not been released as of Thursday evening.
The latest wave of violence along the U.S. border was sparked by a dispute this past winter between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel marking a violent split between former allies who had joined forces in 2003 to battle rival gangs from Mexico's Pacific Coast. The ultimate prize remains the same; control of the smuggling routes which funnel narcotics and illegal immigrants into the United States.
Meanwhile here in America, the Obama regime and their fellow travelers in the mainstream media are busy controlling the news from our southern border and using their power and influence to prevent the state of Arizona from taking badly needed steps to protect their citizens.
paboehmke@yahoo.com
