Miami (September 11, 2013)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) expressed today to the Mexican government its serious concerns regarding the lack of resolution of journalist Jesús Blancornelas’ attack, which has gone unpunished for the past 14 years.
Last Friday the IAPA became aware of a ruling by the Sixth District Criminal Court of Mexico State exonerating Marco Antonio Quiñones (alias “El Pato”, Marco Arturo Quiñones Sánchez or Marcos Quiñones or José Antonio Mendoza Torres), of the November 27, 1997 attack in which Blancornelas was injured and his bodyguard, Luis Valero, was killed.
Quiñones was identified by the Mexican Attorney General’s Office as one of the hitmen working for the Arellano Félix brothers’ drug cartel (known as the Tijuana Cartel) and a member of the Mexican mafia, “MM,” who was hired to kill Blancornelas, editor of the weekly Zeta.
Quiñones, who is currently serving a 12-year and nine-month prison sentence on an organized crime charge -as a member of the Tijuana Cartel, is due to be released in October 2016. The authorities identified 10 hitmen as having participated in Blancornelas’ attack, alleging the leaders of the cartel group are the masterminds.
Zeta has been one of the Mexican media outlets to suffer the most direct attacks in recent years. They have received the support of the IAPA which has documented and denounced these attacks to the Mexican government and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). The IAPA has also denounced the cases of Héctor Félix Miranda and Francisco Ortiz Franco, Zeta executives and journalists, murdered in 1988 and 2004, respectively.
All these attacks continue to go unpunished.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Impunity Committee, Juan Francisco Ealy Ortiz, lamented that a federal judge has not found sufficient evidence to sentence even the perpetrator identified by the Mexican Attorney General’s Office in 2004.
Ealy Ortiz, president of the Mexican newspaper El Universal, added that “for the IAPA this is proof that the government has not carried out its duty to prevent this case, and many others, from going unpunished.”
In this regard, the IAPA called on the Attorney General’s Office to review the case and take the necessary legal steps to charge and convict those involved. The organization also declared that the government should comply with a resolution from the IACHR regarding the Félix Miranda case, in which the authorities are called upon to investigate and determine who the mastermind behind the attack is.
In the attack on Blancornelas the Attorney General’s Office cited and identified in the case file Benjamín Arellano Félix and Ramón Arellano Félix (deceased) as the masterminds.
Indicated as perpetrators were: Alberto González Ortega, Saúl Montes de Oca Morlet, a.k.a. El Ciego (Blind Man), Jorge Alberto Márquez, a.k.a. El Bat (The Bat), Isaac Guevara Hernández, a.k.a. El Zigzag (The Zigzag), Fabián Martínez, a.k.a. El Tiburón (The Shark), Antonio Peña Huerta, a.k.a. El Lalo (The Lalo), Alfredo Araujo Ávila, a.k.a. El Popeye (The Popeye), David Corona Barrón, a.k. El CH (The CH), a hitman who died at the time of the attack, and Marco Antonio Quiñones, a.k.a. El Pato (The Duck), now exonerated.
The IAPA identified three interesting facts regarding Zeta:
Francisco Ortiz Franco, the Zeta publisher and lawyer, collaborated with the IAPA in the review of the Félix Miranda case file, where the IACHR acted as intermediary. Shortly afterwards, on June 22, 2004, Ortiz Franco was gunned down by unidentified assailants who shot him with AK-47 sub-machine guns in front of his 8 and 10 year old children.
In 2002 the IAPA awarded Jesús Blancornelas its Press Freedom Grand Prize. He died on November 23, 2006 from illness.
In November 2009 the IAPA produced and distributed “El Crujir de las Palabras” (The Crunching of Words), a documentary that thoroughly analyzes Ortiz Franco’s murder, exhibits the inconsistencies with the investigation carried out by the authorities, and their lack of interest in prosecuting those responsible; it also displays the multiple attacks on journalists that remain unpunished in Mexico.
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.
