Giordano: Another Grenade Attack Against Por Esto!

Once again, the authentic journalists of Por Esto!, daily newspaper of the Yucatán peninsula, have been attacked, and this time even more violently. Early Friday morning, two fragmentation grenades were thrown into the newspaper's Mérida offices, one of them exploding and injuring several staff members and security guards. Now, another poor Mexican state - this time, Yucatan - is on the verge of social conflict.

Al Giordano reports:

"It was the third violent attack against Por Esto! reporters in eight days, the second in the city of Mérida, and the latest in a long string of attempts to silence the press on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. However, this time, the guilty parties overplayed their hand. In lieu of pursuing the perpetrators, who escaped in a black van, the state attorney general (handpicked by the governor) went and rounded up an anthropology professor and collaborator with the newspaper, Ricardo Delfín Quezada Domínguez of the Autonomous University of Yucatán, and in a mockery of justice detained him for the crime. 'He's my brother!' don Mario told Narco News as the professor was being interrogated in jail. 'This is the man who has denounced all the environmental crimes by the government and its oil company!'

"The reaction by Civil Society was swift and on a scale not seen since the 1990s when Banamex-Citibank director Roberto Hernández Ramírez - exposed for cocaine trafficking on his lands by Por Esto! - unsuccessfully sued the newspaper 17 times in Mexico and once in the New York Supreme Court. In some ways it has been larger, particularly in the media, where large dailies from Mexico City to New York, and international press freedom organizations, that remained silent in the face of the powerful narco-banker attacks on the paper, quickly reported the story this time (perhaps an encouraging sign of a new era of journalistic solidarity in Mexico and América during an hour of moral crisis). But it was on the ground in Yucatán and in the streets of Mérida where public outrage over the attack has boiled over into direct action."

Read the full story in The Narco News Bulletin:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue42/article2039.html

From somewhere in a country called América,

Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin
http://www.narconews.com

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