From ALJAZEERA:
…The desk where Armando “El Choco” Rodriguez once sat – writing tracks on crime and government corruption -has been left vacant as a shrine after he was murdered in a targeted killing in November, 2008. He was sitting in his white Nissan car, preparing to drive his daughter to school, when masked gunmen approached, opened fire with automatic weapons and then fled. No one has been prosecuted for the attack.
“Journalists are being killed systematically and regularly,” says Bruce Bagley, chairman of the international studies department at the University of Miami, who researches Mexico. “Narco groups have decided they don’t like bad publicity in the areas which they control; it has become incredibly dangerous to be an investigative reporter. Often, local and state police are complicit in these attacks.”
A few days before his murder, Rodriguez had written a story linking the state prosecutor’s nephew to drug traffickers. Cartels earn as much as $39bn yearly from selling illicit narcotics, according to the US Justice Department, and serious journalism which exposes criminality is bad for business…
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EDITOR: By perpetuating the War on Drugs, we provide the economic incentive which is the reason to be of the drug cartels. We did the same with Alcohol Prohibition until the Great Depression caused us to consider the economic costs and the lost revenue.
