Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has voiced serious concern after it was confirmed that Jesús Lemus Barajas, editor of the daily El Tiempo, in La Piedad, Michoacán state in south-west Mexico, is being held in preventive custody in a drugs case.
Paris-based RSF on Tuesday called on the federal authorities to produce clear and compelling reasons for his detention and expressed anxiety that he had reportedly been ill-treated.
Police arrested Lemus in Cuerámaro, in the neighbouring state of Guanajuato, on May 7 where he was reporting on drug trafficking and now accuse him of involvement in the trade for “The Family”, an offshoot of the powerful Gulf cartel. He was investigating the “drug trade routes” in Cuerámaro in the south of the country, with two of his sources, when the three men were stopped by police.
His lawyer, Vladimir Camacho, told RSF that his client and his informers were taken separately to a house on the edge of the city where they were kept incommunicado for 48 hours and subjected to brutal interrogation throughout the day of May 8. They were transferred the following day to Puentecilla prison, where the federal public ministry took over the case. The editor’s preventive custody was confirmed on May 15.
“Since the start of a new wave of violence linked to drug trafficking and the murders of several senior police officers, the mood is more one of score-settling rather than of pursuing justice,” the organisation said.
“Unfortunately, we have reason to believe that Jesús Lemus Barajas is the victim both of these circumstances and because of his reporting, which was probably an embarrassment to some of the authorities. The case against him appears weak, even more so since not a shred of physical evidence has been produced against him.”
The public ministry in Guanajuato said in a statement that the three defendants were accused of “instigating organised crime”. The state judicial authorities alleged that the journalist and the two other men “had tried to bribe the local authorities so as to carry out drug-dealing”.
The federal justice ministry, quoted by the May 17 edition of the daily Correo de Guanajuato used the same words, adding that Jesús Lemus Barajas “had passed himself off a journalist” with the aim of approaching officials and police and to “ensure impunity for drug-dealing operations” for ‘The Family’, a clan of the Gulf drug cartel.
Lemus sent a letter to the media on May 18, a copy of which was obtained by RSF, in which he denied the accusations and complained of the conditions in which he was held for the first two days, during which he said he was beaten, tortured and threatened with death.
The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) told RSF that it had opened an investigation into the circumstances of the journalist’s detention after visiting him in Puentecilla jail. The CNDH also said that Lemus had interviewed officials at the public ministry in Guanajuato in pursuit of his reporting on drug-trafficking in southern Mexico.
RSF expressed concern about revelations of ill-treatment the journalist may have suffered in detention, at a time when the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has just condemned the practice of torture by Mexican security forces. “We await the conclusions of the investigation opened by the CNDH in this regard,” it added.
Jesús Lemus Barajas launched El Tiempo in 2006, after working for five years with the daily La Voz de Michoacán and contributing regularly to national daily La Jornada. In March 2008, he exposed harassment of the media by the mayor of La Piedad, which resulted in the detention of two El Tiempo reporters accused of “incitement to rebellion”, while they covered a riot in front of the municipal offices. The journalist had also criticised unfair attribution of official advertising in the municipality and police intimidation of El Tiempo news vendors.
