GULF CARTEL THREATS AGAINST A MEXICAN NEWSPAPER

The reporters of a prestigious northern Mexico newspaper have been threatened by the killers of the Gulf Cartel but don't look to the newspaper to make any announcements about it.

El Imparcial, the Hermosillo, Sonora, daily, received the threat against its reporters last week, according to an internal memo sent to me this morning.

The memo said:

"On Wednesday, Oct. 24, at 6:47 p.m., an anonymous telephone call was received through the Attention to Readers Line. A person calling from a public payphone speaking with a “sureño” accent threatened several reporters from El Imparcial.

The unknown male said a group of Zeta hitmen from Michoacán would be arriving in Sonora this past weekend to “eliminate” several reporters of this newspaper.

They would arrive in a red Dodge Caravan with Michoacán license plate: PLS 5016.

In relation to our Code of Security, we are informing you of this alert so you can take appropriate precautions.

We have also passed this information on to state and federal authorities so they can take action.

We have also solicited the municipal police to provide 24 hour security to the offices of this newspaper."

The Zetas are the enforcers of the Gulf Cartel, the Tamualipas-based narco-trafficking family currently in a war with the Sinaloans. Leaders of the Zetas are former Mexican Special Forces soldiers trained by the United States in Fort Benning, Georgia.

These threats are hard to gauge; there's all kinds of questions to this incident.

One employee of El Imparcial pointed out that the call came as Eduardo Medina Mora, the Mexican Attorney General, was visiting the newspaper last week.

The newspaper apparently feels discretion was the better response and has not said anything publicly about the phoned-in threat.

Another employee, noted that while police were called to secure the newspaper's offices in Hermosillo, the reporters themselves were left somewhat out of the Green Zone and told only to take "appropriate precautions."

"What would they suggest these precautions consist of? They don't pay us enough to afford bulletproof vests," this employee said.

But the ghosts of the past have a nasty way of coming back to haunt us, even in this magical country.

There hasn't been a substantiated threat made against an El Imparcial reporter since the disappearance of Alfredo Jiménez Mota, the organized crime reporter who was kidnapped in April 2005.

In his body of work at El Imparcial, Jiménez uncovered the murder of a Navojoa, Sonora, prosecutor by a drug trafficker. He also documented the rise of an old drug-trafficking family based in Sonoyta, Sonora, at the Arizona border with Mexico.

The federal government took over the investigation into Jiménez’s disappearance. A year later, the organized crime investigations unit retreated from Hermosillo after receiving death threats from the Sonoyta-based traffickers.

Jiménez disappeared during a bloody week in Mexico when two other reporters were gunned down, one along Mexico’s Texas border, the second in Veracruz. Since that time, 24 more reporters were killed or disappeared, making Mexico the second-most dangerous country in the world in which to be a journalist. Only Iraq is more deadly.

His case has never been solved.

-- Michael Marizco