Covering Cartels Is Risky Business, Says Mexican Journalist

By Adrianna McGinley

The Committee to Protect Journalists will award Mexican journalist Javier Arturo Valdez Cardenas next week with the International Press Freedom Award for his work reporting on Mexico’s dangerous drug cartels.

Valdez Cardenas will be honored for his contributions to Riodoce, a weekly publication covering crime and corruption in Sinaloa, Mexico, one of the states that has been most affected by the escalating drug war.

Valdez Cardenas and fellow journalist Dolia Estevez participated in a discussion Friday in Washington, D.C., at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute entitled, “Reporting on Crime and Violence in Mexico.” The duo shared a daunting account of what it’s like to be a journalist amidst constant violence and eternal threat.

“The narco commands the news,” Valdez Cardenas said. “When I’m writing, I’m not thinking about my wife, my kids, the editor, the director, the reader. I’m writing and I’m thinking about the narco as if he was behind me watching as I write, and I think ‘Will he like it? Will he get pissed off and send me a bouquet of grenades?’…You don’t have to be under direct threat, you assume you’re under threat, reality is a threat…There’s a guy always pointing a firearm at you…following you…with his finger on the trigger waiting for you to cross the line to pull it.”

46 journalists have died since the administration under former Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels in 2006, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The question then is why pursue journalism? And why narco journalism?

Valdez Cardenas said there is no avoiding the narco in regions like Sinaloa.

“In these regions every path leads to the narco,” Valdez Cardenas said. “You could report on soccer, but the narco is there, or argricultural workers, but the owners of the lands are funded with narco money, the car dealerships are owned by narcos…the options are to write about the narco or stay quiet and play dumb.”

“I think we need to assume the responsibility put upon us,” Valdez Cardenas added. “It’s not that one decides to write about the narco, you either do it or you retire…It’s not something you plan to do, but the reality is there and it slaps you in the face and you have to learn to report it…You have to know how to publish the information, how to manage it, but not remain silent. I think silence is an act of complicity and death, and I don’t want to be an accomplice.”

However, not everything that Valdez Cardenas and his colleagues at Riodoce uncover gets published. He said everything that is written and reported undergoes strict scrutiny first in order to determine whether or not it should be made public.

“We only publish 20 percent of the information we have confirmed because a lot of it involves people who go around the streets accompanied by at least 20 gunmen and who have the capacity to move an army of 300 or 400 assassins within 15 minutes, and they’re protected by the police and the military…Instead of thinking about what you’re going to publish, you think about what you shouldn’t publish in order to stay alive, to keep writing.”

Eric Olson, Senior Associate of the Mexico Institute, moderated the discussion and asked how such auto-censorship has affected the quality of journalism in Mexico.

“There’s no liberty of expression,” Valdez Cardenas said. “What we’re doing is mediocre coverage, we’re counting the dead, all we need for that is a damn calculator and a cold heart. At Riodoce, though, we wager to tell the stories of the dead and the living, we investigate the narco.”

Dolia Estevez, an independent Mexican journalist and Senior Advisor of the Mexico Institute’s Initiative on Cross Border Journalism, said the government of Mexico is failing in its responsibility to protect journalists who risk their lives to inform the public.

“The state has the responsibility to protect this field because it is a social service, but they’re not doing it,” Estevez said. “It costs nothing to kill a journalist in Mexico, there is no consequence.”

Estevez also noted the failure of news organizations to stand up and seek justice when a journalist is murdered. 

“The news organizations say ‘we don’t know what he was involved in,” Estevez said. “And with that, they disqualify or minimize or ignore the fact that there is a real problem.”

Estevez said the Mexican legislature is now considering a bill that would make crimes against journalists a federal offense, but noted that the legislation has been on the table for years. It is expected, however, to pass this time around and finally become law.

“We need an institutional response and political will from all parties to admit there is a grave problem of violence and censorship and auto-censorship of journalism,” Estevez said. “Society is not receiving the information it needs.”

Kissinger Critiques Obama's Afghan Strategy

By Lisa Kellman

The man who played a quintessential role in shaping Cold War policy, opening China for trade and ending the war in Vietnam shared deep hesitation Tuesday with America’s strategy to effectively leave Afghanistan by 2014.

During a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson Center Tuesday, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that the U.S. should attempt to negotiate with Afghanistan’s neighbors before delving into talks with the Taliban.

“For the purposes of ending the war, the first negotiation ought to…be with surrounding countries because the Taliban of all the possible negotiating partners has the greatest interest in getting us out and the least interest in maintaining the subsequent agreement,” said Kissinger.

Surrounding countries will be affected the most by America’s withdrawal, and thus America’s fundamental principle should be to create a framework for Afghanistan that can be sustained by countries that have an interest in conserving it, Kissinger explained.

The issue America now faces with Afghanistan is no different than any other modern American war in history, Kissinger added, including Vietnam. Kissinger said that in Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan, America selected objectives that were e too difficult to achieve in the allotted time.

Dubai Sex Workers In Need Of NGOs Says Expert

By Meagan Wiseley - University of New Mexico/Talk Radio News Service

Woodrow Wilson Fellow Scholar and expert on Middle-Eastern studies Pardis Mahdavi spoke today about her findings on her ethnographic research on migrant workers and sex workers in the United Arab Emirates. She believes the creation of civil society organizations, or NGOs, aimed to support trafficked workers will end the abuse that is currently afflicting these men and women.

“My recommendation would be to actually strengthen civil society. There are a series of informal groups that are working on the ground to address the needs to migrant workers and sex workers,” said Mahdavi.

The 2009 annual Trafficking In Persons Report, or TIP, was released and placed the United Arab Emirates on the Tier 2 Watch list. The report defines nations on this list as having "governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.”

Mahdavi said that some of the recommendations made in the report are not designed to help trafficked people in the Persian Gulf. The report recommends a tightening of borders and an increase in police forces.

“Tightening borders typically actually only makes people more likely to end up in the informal economy, or more reliant on smugglers...they are more likely to rely on these shady middle men who put them in these cycles of violence,” she added.

Mahdavi emphasized the importance of accountability and transparency within these civil society organizations. She said if these NGOs are funded by the government and forced to comply with a series of standards in order to protect trafficked workers, abuses and more trafficking will be easily recognized and put to an end.

“What we need is transparency and accountability. These groups need to be accountable to one another,” she added.

Latinos: The Sleeping Giant?

By Celia Canon- Talk Radio News Service

The U.S is not responding to the needs of its Hispanic citizens even though the population of Hispanics college students in the US rises and many industries are gearing their marketing toward this changing demographic, according to former director of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Henry Cisneros.

Cisneros, now Executive Director at CityView and author of “Latinos and the Nation’s Future”, gave a speech on” Latinos and the Nation’s Future” today at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

“A very interesting phenomenon will be the growth of the second generation of Hispanic immigrants. The Pew Foundation says that this number, which is 11 million second generation Hispanics today, will be 30 million in 2030, so it will triple in 20 years or so,” said Cisneros.

Recently, the nomination of Hispanic judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has brought many criticisms from Republicans, who argue that she is not being sufficiently patriotic because she pronounces her name with a Spanish accent.The criticism of Sotomayor has renewed the debate on immigration integration.

Tamar Jacoby, President and CEO of ImmigrationWorks USA and co-author of “Latinos and the Nation’s Future”, said “For a long time, people have said that Latinos in American politics were the sleeping giant of American politics... The reason they thought that is because they said ‘look at these people, look at these demographics’... The political participation was below the potential.”

But Jacoby rejoiced of this complete turn for the best which began with the most recent presidential election of Barack Obama, saying that “In November 2004, 7.5 million Latinos voted; In 2008, 11 million Latinos voted.”

As a consequence of this Hispanic political awakening, Cisneros says that “We will see that the make up of community schools and colleges will be decidedly different in the time period we are describing... We will see that in markets as consumer products relate to the reality of these markets.”

Cisneros added that “Many industries view the growth of Latinos and immigration as the principal basis by which they will grow.”

“The sleeping giant woke up,” said Jacoby.

Book Shines Positive Light On Guantanamo

By Annie Berman - Talk Radio News Service

Most books about the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay concentrate on the detainees and their interrogation. Karen Greenberg's book, “The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days" focuses instead on a group of U.S soldiers who tried to stop the Pentagon from bypassing the Geneva Conventions and implementing harsh policies, including torture policies.

Greenberg, the Executive Director of the Center of Law and Security
at the New York University School of Law, spoke today at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

“There’s a lot of talk about was this a systematic torture policy? The way that people have gone about answering the question is to focus on Washington, the Pentagon, Bush, Cheney, Paddington...Now we know [orders to torture detainees] came from the top,” Greenberg said.

In her research, Greenberg interviewed troops stationed at Guantanamo who worked at the detention facility when the first detainees arrived in 2002.

Greenberg believes that the 1,700 troops that received the first 300 detainees at Guantanamo followed the guidelines of the Geneva Convention and treated the detainees decently.