Two days after being attacked by a drug gang, the newspaper El Manana of Nuevo Laredo said it will suspend publishing news of narco conflicts in the area.
On Friday, armed men shot up the newspaper’s offices and threw an explosive device as well. It marked the seventh armed attack on media offices in the state of Tamaulipas in six years.
The city, opposite Laredo, Texas, has been the scene of repeated flare-ups of intense violence between drug cartels. It was the first Mexican city to erupt in the drug violence in 2005, as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf Cartel, with its then-allies, the Zetas, battled for hegemony.
The current battle for the Nuevo Laredo plaza — the term for drug territory leading into the U.S. — is between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas. Also on Friday, 14 decapitated bodies were found stuffed into a minivan in the city.
In a story for the Houston Chronicle, ace reporters Dudley Althaus and Dane Schiller, wrote that a banner over an overpass, addressed to the Gulf Cartel, read: “This is how I am going to finish off all the fools you send to heat up the plaza. We’ll see you around, you bunch of parasites.”
The continual killing of reporters in Mexico and the pressure that the cartels place on the media shows just how inefficient and ineffective the government of Mexico really is. While the government would love for people to believe that the more than fifty thousand people that have died in this war were all narcos, the reality is that many are innocent victims, like journalists, bystanders, and many other innocents that have died as the result of an incredible crime wave that has been unleashed as an indirect consequence of Calderon’s narcoguerra.