The IAPA today welcomed the decision by Mexico’s Interior Ministry and Attorney General’s Office to reorganize the special prosecutor’s office in charge of crimes against journalists so its battle against the impunity surrounding the crimes is more effective.

Yesterday, in a working session with an IAPA international delegation, Interior Minister Fernando Gómez Mont and Attorney General Arturo Chávez Chávez announced that the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Dealing With Crimes Committed Against Journalists was reorganized last Friday and a new public prosecutor, Gustavo Salas Chávez, named to replace Octavio Orellana.

Under the reorganization, which still must be approved through administrative channels and published in the official gazette, the Special Prosecutor’s Office will report directly to the Attorney General rather than to the Human Rights Division for Dealing with Victims and Services to the Community.

IAPA President Alejandro Aguirre, managing editor of the Miami, Florida, Spanish-language newspaper Diario Las Américas, declared this to be “an important step that meets one of our longtime goals since the public prosecutor’s office has had its hands tied, powerless to carry out its duties as a prosecutor’s office and unable to efficiently present cases at the federal level, which was the objective when it was established in 2006.”

In the conversation with the IAPA delegation Gómez Mont also addressed the subject of weaknesses in the system that would have to be resolved, namely the ambiguity of jurisdiction between state and federal governments, and the need to define legal responses that enable greater transparency in investigations of crimes against journalists.

IAPA delegates delivered documentation and requested information on the status of investigations into the murders of 16 journalists that were handled by the Attorney General’s Office with no known results. They also brought up other unsolved cases which the IAPA submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), including those of Héctor Félix Miranda and Víctor Manuel Oropeza. In these cases the Mexican government had received IACHR recommendations to accept international responsibility but had never expressed itself.

The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, and the committee’s regional vice-chairman for Mexico, Juan Fernando Healy, gave details of the impunity that still surrounds the murder of American reporter Phillip True in 1998 and the disappearance in April 2005 of Alfredo Jiménez Mota who worked for the San Antonio Express-News, Texas, and El Imparcial of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, respectively.

At the end of the meeting there were pledges to continue looking into legal and administrative reforms to combat impunity and violence against journalists as well as to follow up on the cases the IAPA has before the IACHR.

In addition to Aguirre, Rivard and Healy the delegation included Juan Francisco Ealy Ortiz, El Universal, Mexico; Juan Fernando Healy, Periódicos Healy, Mexico; José Santiago Healy, Diario San Diego, United States; Roberto Rock, El Universal, Mexico, Julio Muñoz, IAPA Executive Director, and Ricardo Trotti, Press Freedom Director.

Later the delegation took part in a forum with Senate President Carlos Navarrete (PRD party), federal senators and congressmen belonging to various political parties, as well as Raúl Plascencia, chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Luis González, legal counsel to the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM), Arelí Gómez, Assistant Attorney General, and editors and publishers from the Mexican media.

Juan Francisco Ealy Ortiz, president of El Universal, stressed the importance of coming up with common ground allowing the press to conduct a “joint battle” against violence, while agreeing with Plascencia that “what is needed and cannot be postponed for democracy” is legal reform that makes crimes against journalists federal offenses.

Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) Senator Mario López Valdez told the delegation of a legislative bill for a Law on Journalists at High Risk that he presented last month, together with Senators Jorge Castro Trenti and Carlos Lozano de la Torre, that would allow the Attorney General’s Office try such cases at the federal level.

Navarette explained that the Senate is open to continuing debate on this bill but during the talks it was noted that there are other bills that are stalled in the upper House and yet others that are still in the Chamber of Deputies, concluding that there is a need to establish parliamentary status for all the bills regarding violence against journalists.

Navarette indicated that there is political will in the Senate to bring about a reform during the current legislative term between now and April.

At the end of the meeting legislators present announced that this Thursday the Special Committee on Attacks Upon Journalists – which operated last year and had been disbanded in September at the start of the new congressional session – would be reinstated, a demand repeated by the IAPA in recent months.