I’m embarrassed that I’m getting to this three weeks late. But that’s also part of the story. Writing about Francisco Ortiz Franco could not be postponed any longer after I passed through Tijuana this weekend and saw on the newsstands that Zeta — the crusading weekly magazine Ortiz co-founded — was still in mourning over his brutal assassination on June 22. Ortiz, an accomplished investigative reporter, was shot four times at the wheel of his car parked outside a Tijuana clinic while his two children — aged 8 and 10 — looked on horrified from the back seat.
Zeta’s all-black cover featured a headline calling out “The Suspects.” The inside text focused on the men around billionaire businessman and current candidate for Tijuana mayor Jorge Hank Rhon. Back in 1988, when another of Zeta’s founding journalists was similarly gunned down, two of Hank’s bodyguards were convicted of the crime. For the last 16 years, Zeta has fearlessly run a full-page display every week insisting that Hank explain the motive of the killing.
Everyone, of course, knows the answer. With its motto of “Free Like the Wind,” the scrappy, underfinanced and ad-starved Zeta has relentlessly exposed the incestuous connections that link up some of Baja California’s wealthiest citizens with its most corrupt law-enforcement agencies and with the most violent of drug cartels. I had never met Ortiz. But just a few months ago I had the privilege of hosting a Tijuana dinner for his partner, Jesus Blancornelas, yet another founder of Zeta. And yet another target of salaried killers. Blancornelas was himself hit with four bullets in 1997, when gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons at his car while he was driving to his Tijuana office. He barely survived, but his personal bodyguard was murdered.
When he showed up for our dinner recently in a small banquet room at Tijuana’s posh Camino Real Hotel, he was preceded by a half dozen heavily armed bodyguards. They cased the whole room, studied the windows, and moved the podium from which Blancornelas would speak, making sure it was out of range of any possible sniper from a nearby rooftop. For some these might seem rather extraordinary security measures for a soft-spoken, short-statured and bespectacled 68-year-old magazine editor. But many of the two dozen other reporters I had brought to the dinner (as part of a “rolling seminar” co-sponsored by USC’s Institute for Justice and Journalism and the Western Knight Center) were seasoned border reporters and knew firsthand the ferocity of the powerful — especially when riled.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0715-01.htm
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