MEXICO'S NEWS BLACKOUT SHOWING CRACKS

By Juan Montoya
The Draconian news blackout imposed by the Mexican government to prevent its citizens (and the residents across the border) from learning the full extent of the war that is raging between cartels and between the military and the cartels is showing a few cracks.
Bit by bit, news of the confrontations occurring daily have appeared in news outlets in the United States and in the Mexican capital (El Universal) despite the heavy-handed censors of the Mexican government.
In a repeat of the Iran election crisis and protests, Emails and cell-phone photos have replaced the wire services and news media as the conduits of news not only to the Mexicans themselves, but to the rest of the world.
From You-Tube to My Space reports have shown the true face of the war raging across the northern Mexican states and in the interior. Graphic scenes depicting decapitated bodies and banners from the cartels telling residents their side of the story have replaced reporters and television networks news reports.
If you want to hear news about the gun battles in Reynosa, Matamoros, or Rio Bravo and Miguel Aleman, for that latter, look in the Internet. You won't find any news in the Mexican networks or news dailies.
What you will find are the posed "presentamientos" where a couple of miserable-looking "suspects" are presented before the media in front of an arsenal of ammunition and heavy weapons, included, but not limited to, armored cars and grenade launchers.
Out goes the presumption of innocence or trial by jury of your peers. After they duly incriminate themselves before the servile reporters, they are marched out to the hole they are being kept to be pulled out again when a new "presentacion" is deemed necessary.
It has gotten to the point where Joaquin Lopez Doriga, the talking head for Televisa's nightly news show has been publicly threatened by citizens through Emails that if the network doesn't report the news, he and his family should prepare to face the consequences.
In other words, if he and the network don't do their job, they might be harmed.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the Inter-American Press Association reported Wednesday that only three of eight journalists the journalists kidnapped between Feb. 18 and March 3 in Reynosa have reappeared: Two were released alive and one was found dead with signs of torture. Five are still missing.
"The Mexican government must act with urgency and with due force to rescue these journalists alive," said IAPA President Alejandro Aguirre.Aguirre called the abductions "serious and without precedent in the Western Hemisphere."The kidnappings are believed to have been carried out by drug gangs in Tamaulipas, where Reynosa is located."
The state of Tamaulipas has opened up its own website to tell its version of the ongoing war. And the military is reporting in its own website through the Secretariat of Security its ongoing tally on the great successes it is having against organized crime and telling the citizens that the government is no longer waging war against the cartels. Rather, it says, it is the cartels that are killing each other.
Is that supposed to make Mexican citizens feel safer?
"Already there is an exodus of business people crossing the river and setting up their businesses in Texas because they don't feel safe in northern Mexico," a U.S. State Department official told a news daily. "They are not illegal aliens because most of them are U.S. citizens who were living in Mexico doing business there."
Are we witnessing the start of another armed revolution just as we did when Villa and Zapata ousted dictator Porfirio Diaz? At the time, thousands of Mexicans fled to the United States to escape the indiscriminate violence in the country.
Now it appears that the Mexican government's imposition of martial law on the norhtern border lacks any economic or social incentives for these groups – and their supporters – to follow the government's policies.
In other words, it's all sticks and no carrot.