What do you want from us?: The title of a front-page editorial published this Sunday by the El Diario paper in Juárez, Mexico. The editorial is addressed to the drug cartels responsible for epic levels of violence in the area, including increasing incidents of torture, kidnapping, and murder of reporters—including two victims, just last week, from this same paper.
I will try to translate, please forgive any errors in my clumsy grasp of Spanish:
Gentlemen of the various [narco] organizations fighting in the square of Ciudad Juarez: the deaths of two reporters from this publication in less than two years represents an irreparable breakdown for all of us who work here, and in particular, for our families.
We want you to be aware that we are communicators, not psychics. Therefore, as information workers, we want you to explain what you want from us, what is it that you would intend we publish or not publish, so that we know what is expected of us.
You are, at present, the de facto authorities in our city, because the legally mandated institutions have not been able to do anything to prevent our colleagues from continuing to fall, although we have repeatedly demanded help from those institutions.
That is why, faced with this undeniable reality, we are compelled to write to you and ask directly, because the last thing that we want is for another one of our colleagues to again fall the victim to your gunfire.
Image: mourners at the funeral of Luis Carlos Santiago, a photographer with El Diario in Juárez, shot to death last week.
(El Diaro, Juárez, MX, via Blog del Narco, and Pablo Defendini)
