Miami (June 8, 2010)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today voiced concern and issued a “call for sanity” in the political campaign prior to elections in the Mexican state of Sinaloa that has degenerated into attacks on the local newspaper El Debate and direct threats to its owners.
Jesús Vizcarra Calderón, a candidate for Sinaloa governor on the combined ticket of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the Ecological Green Party (PVEM) and New Alliance (NA), threatened the owners of the El Debate chain of papers, Ildefonso Salido and his son Javier, that he would take action against them.
IAPA President Alejandro Aguirre, editor of the Miami, Florida, Spanish-language newspaper Diario Las Américas, said that in the run-up to the local elections on July 4 “we call for sanity and publicly ask the contenders to respect freedom of expression and show restraint in statements that could harden attitudes and give rise to violence against the press and to self-censorship.”
Vizcarra, who claims that the newspaper favors the opposition candidate, warned its owners, through an intermediary, that “he isn’t going to tolerate it any longer” and “they are going to regret it,” which the two felt could be interpreted as a risk to their physical wellbeing. The events were said to have occurred on June 5, the argument having arisen from a question put by an El Debate reporter to Vizcarra about alleged family ties to a now dead drug trafficker, following up remarks made by the candidate’s mother.
For his part, Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, Texas, and chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, supported the President Aguirre, adding “precisely in a context of violence the threats and the heated climate can serve to encourage those who resort to violence to act and restrict the public’s right to information, exactly at a time when information is essential in order to make decisions.”
In November 2008 the IAPA repudiated a hand-grenade attack on El Debate in Culiacán, the Sinaloa state capital. In February 2009 the hemispheric organization also condemned a rifle attack on the home of the editor of El Debate in Guasave, Sinaloa, Moisés García Castro, who was uninjured.
Sinaola is regarded as one of the most violent regions of Mexico, with according to local media 950 executions being carried out in the first five months of this year, 130 last month alone, most of them attributed to organized crime and disputes among criminal gangs.
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org
