THE BORDER REPORT

Milenio newspaper is reporting that a reporter kidnapped last night turned up dead this morning. Eliseo Barrón Hernández was a cops reporter for La Opiníon Milenio in Gomez Palacio, Durango. He'd worked there for more than ten years.

Initial reports have it that at 8:05 p.m. last night, a group of eight men stormed his house and kidnapped him in front of his two daughters. The men wore masks and drove off in two Nissan sedans.

Barrón is the second Durango journalist to be gunned down this month alone. Carlos Ortega, a cops reporter for El Tiempo de Durango newspaper. He was pulled from his car and shot down in the street. Ortega was also the only journalist to have the chance to indict those most interested in his killing.

The day before he died, he fingered the mayor and a local representative for the Feds as those responsible should anything happen to him after he wrote a critical story of the local slaughterhouses. He also fingered a cop he'd been tracking on corruption charges.

The last stories Barrón wrote were about the 300 local cops who failed background checks and were dismissed and the politics brewing inside the city police department. The difference in the two murder cases lies in the magnitude of their respective newspapers. Milenio is a powerful newspaper with distribution throughout the country. Tiempo is a regional state-wide paper. Da lo mismo to the dead men but if Milenio has the interest, it certainly has the capacity to not let this murder case go unsolved.