07 Mar 12 | Mexico
The author and publisher of a bestselling book on Mexican drug trafficking were sued in Mexico City this week for defamation. Anabel Hernandez, and the publisher Random House Mondadori were sued following remarks contained in Los Señores del Narco, The Lords of Drug Trafficking, a book that takes to task Mexican politicians and businessmen and traces a system of corruption and collusion back to the 1970s.
Former Attorney General Jorge Carpizo said the book damaged his reputation by insinuating he kept $400 thousand dollars of the reward money earmarked for the 1993 capture of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera. Carpizo believes Hernandez attacked him without valid sources, and without presenting any official evidence of her charges. “Having access to various public documents and books, the journalist made a number of affirmations that lack truth and context”, said the lawsuit, which was filed on the heels of an announcement by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), that Anabel Hernandez had won their Golden Pen for Freedom award for 2012.
Hernandez, a reporter for online magazine Reporte Indigo, said in an interview that Carpizo’s charges were baseless. “I adhere to the principles of the Constitution and Mexico’s Press Law,” she said, arguing that the lawsuit from Carpizo’s is in retaliation for details included in the book which mentioned the names of powerful Mexicans. “In a book of 600 pages, I mention Carpizo three times,” she explained. Carpizo was one of five attorney generals who served under former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
The book was published in Spanish in December 2010 and has remained on the bestseller list in Mexico, having also sold a record number of copies in the United States. The book makes several assertions that have caused Hernandez trouble. In it she claims that the governments of Vicente Fox, who served in office from 2000 to 2006, and Felipe Calderon, who will leave office in December this year, made a pact to protect the Sinaloa Cartel, led by El Chapo Guzman, the same kingpin who was captured by Carpizo in 1993. Guzman escaped from a high security prison in 2001, a few months after Fox took office. According to the book, Calderon’s war on drugs is only against enemies of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Hernandez has lived with fulltime bodyguards since publishing the book. “I knew I was touching a lot of important and powerful people, so I accept my fate,” she said. According to the journalist, the lawsuit against her is just one of several that have been lodged against Mexican journalists to silence them. “This is the latest technique to attack freedom of the press,” she insisted. “They keep us going from tribunal to tribunal, and stop us from doing our work.” Last year Hernandez publicly accused Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna, who is accused of protecting drug traffickers in the book, of planning to assassinate her.
Hernandez took 5 years to write the book. She will receive the WAN´s Golden Pen of Freedom award in September 2012 in Ukraine. She is the first Latin American reporter to receive the award since 1990, when the late Luis Gabriel Cano won the award. Cano was brother of Guillermo Cano, who was killed by Colombin drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
17 Feb 12 | Americas, Mexico
Mexican politicians are using social networks in sleight of hand similar to the ones they used in elections before the age of technology, say critics. Instead of paying voters to show up for the vote, or stuffing boxes — known practices in previous mid-term or presidential elections — today’s savvy campaign managers are helping their candidates swell up their numbers of Twitter followers and Facebook “likes”.
“They are doing online what they used to do offline,” according to Maria Elena Meneses, a media expert and professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey who has studied elections and the Internet.
The campaign of ruling party presidential candidate Josefina Vasquez Mota drew much criticism after it allegedly used an internet bot to create a trending topic during recent elections to select the presidential candidate for the ruling Partido de Accion Nacional. News magazine Procesoreported that news sites that had measured the growth of the Vasquez Mota’s followers could determine how many of them were obtained through the bots.
Despite this criticism, Vasquez Mota seems to have one of the best online media teams. Her approach is similar to that used by US President Barak Obama in his 2008 presidential elections. The team’s use of various hashtags to trigger a trending topic, including the hashtag #HoyganaJosefina, which means “today Josefina wins”, helped expand her followers list by 31,000 in only a few hours in late January during her party’s internal election process (detractors say this is where the campaign used bots). The candidate’s Facebook page also has a lot of young followers.
Meneses says it is estimated that 15 million Internet users in Mexico are between the ages of 18 and 34. The young vote will be the more difficult to harness in the next presidential elections in July: 34 million new voters who turned 18 between 2006 and this year will be voting this presidential election.
But the presidential campaigns have a wooden Internet presence. Enrique Peña Nieto, the presidential candidate for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), whose party ruled Mexico for 70 years until 2000, uses YouTube, but, Meneses says, not in a way that would attract young voters. “They only tape their campaign presentations. There is no give and take with the audience, which is what young voters want,” she says.
Meneses says none of the three presidential candidates for the three major parties — the PAN, the PRI and the left of center Partido Revolucionario Democratico, (PRD) — are using social media effectively to reach and communicate with common citizens. “They could use those sites to respond to uncomfortable questions,” she insists.
03 Feb 12 | Mexico
It has become a game of “he said”, “she said”. But two recent scuttles that developed in Mexico over telecommunications and television channels are at the heart of freedom of expression and access to information debate in the country.
Last week it was announced that Televisa and TV Azteca, two large monopolies that dominate open television in Mexico, were trying to get into the quadruple play mobile business by offering broadband Internet access, and telephone with wireless capabilities. Last April, both companies, who together capture 98 per cent of the Mexican viewing public and are often seen as adversaries, bought 50 per cent of mobile phone company Iusacell.
Their aim was to revamp the company to compete with Mexico’s multibillionaire Carlos Slim, who owns the most powerful Mexican mobile phone service provider, Telcel. But last week the Mexican Commission of Competence issued an order that said the merge had been rejected, even after representatives of both TV Azteca and Televisa tried to influence the vote.
The dust on the case had barely settled when the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, (OECD), issued a report on Monday that claimed that lack of competence, weak regulations and a permissive legal system has cost Mexican mobile users more than 29 billion USD in overcharges in the period 2005 to 2009. The edict by the international organisation rattled in Mexico. It was front page news in all the major national media. The release of the report led Slim, who is known for not being shy, to respond to the statement at a press conference on Wednesday, calling the OECD information “false and misleading”.
To say that Mexico loses 25 billion dollars in overcharges for mobile usage is wrong. (…) Even if they use the income we earn from Telcel or Telmex, [the fixed line company that is also a monopoly controlled by Slim] the figures are wrong because both companies only sell 17 billion dollars a year.
The OECD did something it never does, and responded to Slim. It said Slim’s companies were aware of what was going to be said in the OECD report and that his employees were part of the consultations. It also refuted what Slim said, arguing that it was wrong to compare what the mobile and telephone market has lost in Mexico (because of lack of opportunity to compete) with the total amounts of sales and services from Slim’s companies.
The debate over the television channels and the cellphone problems is still on the sidelines. The decision will probably be left for the next president who will be elected this July and take office at the end of the year. Till then, these two issues, both of which have a large impact on the rights of Mexican citizens to an open market, impact freedom of expression by limiting the access to an open debate over public airwaves.
16 Jan 12 | Americas, Mexico
Making the wrong commentary about the drug war in Mexico could create problems for public figures. Take the case of Kate del Castillo, a Mexican actor who incurred the wrath of many in the country after she tweeted that she preferred drug gang leader Chapo Guzman to the government.
Her mistake was to post a long statement on social media site Twextra. “Today, I believe more in El Chapo Guzman than in the governments that hide truths from me,” she wrote, adding later:
“Mr Chapo, wouldn’t it be great if you started trafficking with positive things? With cures for diseases, with food for street children, with alcohol (drinks) for old people in retirement homes, where they are not allowed to spend their final days doing whatever they like. You can traffic with corrupt politicians and not with women and children who end up as slaves?”
She ended the statement urging Guzman, one of Mexico’s most powerful drug bosses, to become “The Hero of Heroes,” a play on a Mexican corrido song describing a top drug baron as the “Jefe de Jefes” or Boss of Bosses.
El Chapo, which translates to “Shorty”, is one of Mexico’s most powerful drug traffickers. He was named the most influential drug trafficker in the world by the US Treasury Department, and has been ranked as one of the richest Mexicans by Forbes for the last three consecutive years.
The only entertainers who flocked to support Kate were Ranchera singer Chavela Vargas and Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin, plus her ex-husband Demian Bichir.
Most Mexican entertainers stay away from appearing too chummy with known drug traffickers. Several singers of traditional grupero music have been killed in the last few years. None of the cases have been solved and the killings are said to be linked to songs the singers were paid to compose and make famous. Many of the songs describing and praising drug traffickers are called “narco-corridos”, a spin on the traditional corrido ballad music of Mexico.
Del Castillo, a top name in Mexico, recently moved into the US market, playing a role in Showtime’s Weeds. She also starred in the Spanish-language TV series La Reina del Sur, in which she played a female drug trafficker. The series is based on a real life drug trafficker, Sandra Avila, known as La Reina del Pacifico, who is in a Mexican jail today, fighting extradition to the United States for cocaine smuggling. Avila laundered money for the Chapo Guzman’s drug syndicate.
