NUEVO LAREDO, Tamaulipas — Once more, a Mexican drug cartel has attacked and threatened news outlets in this border city. The most recent incident forced one of the newspapers to stop printing for two days.
El Mañana from Nuevo Laredo published on Tuesday a small notice where they announced that they had stopped their circulation for two days without mentioning the reason.
A spokesman for the news outlet who asked to remain anonymous citing security reasons claimed that on Saturday, gunmen assaulted three employees of the newspaper. The employees were part of the delivery crews.
The gunmen damaged one of the delivery trucks and threatened reporters, employees, as well as delivery men, the newspaper source revealed.
Another source with direct knowledge of the case noted that organized crime members had threatened the journalists who work there before the attack.
While it has not been revealed which cartel carried out the attack, as Breitbart Texas has been reporting, the city of Nuevo Laredo continues to be an area under the control of the Cartel Del Noreste faction of the Los Zetas.
El Mañana is one of the newspapers that has been the target of the worst attacks since the start of the fierce wars between cartels. Starting sometime before 2004, the Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas went to war over control of this city and years later, violence struck again when Los Zetas and their former bosses with the Gulf Cartel faced off. In March 2004, the local publication’s director, Roberto Mora, was murdered in a crime that remains largely unsolved. Amid multiple attacks, the outlet self-censured itself and stopped publishing stories about organized crime.
After the most recent attack, the Network of Journalists of Mexico’s Northeast published a statement demanding that the Government of Mexico end the impunity with which Mexican cartels operate where they are able to threaten and attack news outlets without consequence.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
“M.B. Martinez” of the Cartel Chronicles project contributed to this report.
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