Four journalists in the Lagunera region of northern Mexico have disappeared just days after the revelation of a major corruption story. According to a press release by the National Human Rights Commission, the missing journalists include a reporter from Multimedios, two cameramen from the Gómez Palacio Televisa affiliate who were “picked up” (or “levantado”) in broad daylight around noon on Monday the 26th. The fourth missing reporter works for the El Vespertino newspaper in Gómez Palacio and disappeared around 11pm or the same day.
This comes in the wake of a corruption scandal in which prison guards in Gómez Palacios, Durango allegedly released and armed convicts to carry out mass murder in Torreón, Chihuahua. The two sister cities are one metropolitan area separated by a river which marks the state line.
Federal police investigators dropped this bombshell in a weekend press conference after looking into the July 18th massacre of 17 people at a birthday in a hotel. Eighteen people were wounded in the same attack. This was the third such massacre this year thought to have been committed by inmates released from the state penitentiary in Gómez Palacios. Crime scene shell casings were traced to assault rifles used by guards at the prison.
The four missing journalists aren’t the only victims in the scandal’s immediate fall out. A prison guard has been killed and 8 human heads have been found around the city of Durango, capital of the state of the same name.
Seventeen people died in the early hours of July 18th when gunmen attacked a birthday party in a hotel in the northern city of Torreón. Investigators from the Mexican Attorney General’s Office say those who committed the crime were supposed to be locked up in a prison across the Durango state line at the time of the massacre.
Federal authorities allege that not only were dangerous criminals released from their cells, but that prison guards lent them high-caliber firearms and official vehicles. Investigators traced the weapons back to the prison from crime scene shell casings. The same weapons were allegedly used in at least 2 other massacres this year.
This isn’t the first time prison officials in the state of Durango have been accused of colluding with inmates tied to the region’s powerful drug trafficking interests. Four prison officials are currently under investigation.
Many of Mexico’s overcrowded prisons are microcosms of the drug violence that has claimed more than 24 thousand lives here since President Felipe Calderón launched his military approach to the Drug War in December of 2006.
President Calderon has carefully cultivated his tough-on-crime image since deploying the military to fight the Drug War just days after taking office. While the military strategy sparked some of the worst bloodshed Mexico has seen in decades, the administration insists the violence means cartel infrastructure is crumbling.
So, it came as a surprise to some when Calderon himself proposed a measure to decriminalize the possession of small quantities of illegal drugs. At the height of the Swine Flu scare in late April, Mexico’s Congress passed a bill that would allow users to carry up to 5 grams of marijuana, half a gram of cocaine, 2 grams of opium, and smaller doses of heroin or methamphetamines.
Symbolic Importance
“When you’re decriminalizing possession like this, it has essentially no international consequences,” says Ethan Nadelmann, Executive Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a US-based organization that promotes alternatives to the Drug War. “This is not about the production, sale, distribution – it’s none of that sort of stuff. So, there’s no reason to think that this is going to make marijuana much more available in Mexico or lower its price coming across the border. It’s really about changing a small element of the legal relationship between the cop and somebody who’s picked up with marijuana or maybe some other drug in a small amount.”
The bill creates three different legal categories for drug offenders; users, addicts, and small time dealers. What separates a user from an addict will be up to a police investigator, but what sets a dealer apart from the rest is quantity; anything over the tolerated limit. Dealing offenses also carry mandatory minimum sentences harsher than those under current law.
