Mexican drug wars: four journalists abducted

An ominous new chapter in Mexico's vicious drug wars appears to have opened this week with the abduction of four journalists as they went about their work. It's not the first time that journalists have been targeted  - 67 have been killed in the past decade - but the motivation behind this latest incident is unprecedented.

One of the men kidnapped, Jaime Canales, a cameraman for the TV station Multimedios Laguna, contacted his office on Wednesday with a demand from his as yet unidentified captors: air three videos on the noon news of Grupo Milenio.

The broadcaster complied with the request, transmitting 15 minutes of footage in which local people complain of collusion between the Zeta drug cartel and Mexican police forces. As yet there is no sign that the kidnappers have fulfilled their part of the bargain and released the cameraman.

The reports of cooperation between drug cartels and the police was the story the journalists were covering when they were abducted on Monday. They were in the northern state of Durango investigating accusations of corruption at a jail in the town of Gomez Palacio - accusations that had led to the arrest the previous week of jail director Margarita Rojas and numerous other members of her staff.

It is alleged by the Mexican attorney-general's office that the jailers had been complicit in allowing inmates to leave the jail each night to attack rival drug gangs.

Ricardo Najer of the attorney-general's office said the inmates were given weapons and vehicles by prison staff on the understanding that once the murders had been committed they would return to their cells. Among the crimes alleged to have been carried out by inmates at the jail were the fatal shooting of 17 people at a party in the city of Torreon two weeks ago.

The gunmen dispute these claims and abducted the journalists to bring the matter to the attention of the wider world. The three other kidnapped journalists are Hector Gordoa and Alejandro Hernandez, cameramen for the national Televisa network, and Oscar Solís, a local newspaper reporter for El Vespertino.

With no news of the men's fate forthcoming, the Committee to Protect Journalists has urged the Mexican government “to do everything in their power to locate the four missing journalists and bring them to safety”. A spokesman for the global organisation, Carlos Lauria, said: "Mexican journalists are paying a terrible price for their work, and authorities must send a clear message that this brutal action will not go unpunished."

Initially, the abduction went largely unreported for fear its coverage might have an adverse attempt on negotiations to release the quartet. But the media blackout was broken on Tuesday by Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, which released a communique condemning the incident.

Grupo Milenio then ran a story about the kidnap of one of its employees, cameraman Jaime Canales, though an executive at the media group admitted: "It's a very delicate, very complicated situation. We are being very careful with information. The lives of our colleagues are in the balance." ·