Pablo Pineda

IN A WATERSHED YEAR FOR MEXICAN DEMOCRACY, the dissolution of ties between much of the media and the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) helped foster a more professional and competitive press in 2000.

The election of National Action Party (PAN) candidate Vicente Fox to the presidency on July 2 ended the PRI's 71-year hold on power, a period during which most media unabashedly supported the regime. In an encouraging sign, the new government quickly pledged that it would promote transparency of information and respect freedom of expression and of the press. In addition, the Fox administration promised that the Center for Information and National Security, the government intelligence agency, would no longer spy on journalists. (Under the PRI, the government routinely spied on journalists while reacting with hostility to the notion that its activities should be public.)

June 29, 2000

Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León
President of Mexico
Los Pinos
Mexico City, Mexico


Your Excellency,

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is gratified that Mexican journalists have generally been able to cover the current election campaign without government interference. However, we would like to express our concern about a number of recent incidents.

Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in MEXICO.

New York, May 1, 2000 --- The body of radio reporter José Ramírez Puente, the host of a popular news program in the Mexican town of Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, was found in his car late Saturday evening. Ramírez, a 29-year-old reporter with the private station Radio Net, had been stabbed more than 30 times, according to CPJ sources and local press accounts. The murder is believed to have taken place Friday evening, April 28.

Click here to read more about press freedom conditions in MEXICO.

New York, April 13, 2000 --- CPJ is investigating the recent killing of Pablo Pineda, a reporter and photographer with the Mexican newspaper La Opinión in the border city of Matamoros.

On April 9 at approximately 2:45 a.m., agents from the U.S. Border Patrol discovered Pineda's body in Los Indios, just outside Harlingen, Texas. The agents had watched two individuals cross the Rio Grande carrying a bundle wrapped in a white sheet, which was deposited on the U.S. shore. When no one came to retrieve the bundle, the officers investigated and found Pineda's body.