Magazine Says Cops, Drug Lords In Ambush

The magazine whose publisher was critically wounded in an ambush by gunmen said drug lords backed by local police officers may have been responsible for the attack.

The assault on Jesus Blancornelas, the outspoken publisher of the weekly newsmagazine Zeta, drew criticism Friday from two leading professional associations and demands that President Ernesto Zedillo do more to protect Mexican journalists.

About 10 gunmen opened fire on Blancornelas’s car two blocks from the magazine Thursday, wounding him and killing his private bodyguard, who managed to shoot dead one of the attackers before collapsing.

Blancornelas, 67, was in critical but stable condition Friday, hospital officials said.

The attorney general’s office took over the investigation from the Baja California state government after Zeta said the drug gang led by the Arellano Felix brothers may have been behind the attack and that state judicial police officers may have been involved.

The dead attacker was identified as a reputed killer who worked with the Arellano Felix gang. At least four suspects have been arrested for questioning.

The attorney general’s office identified the dead attacker as David Barron Corona, alias C.H., and said he was wanted by Mexican and U.S. authorities in connection with “various crimes,” including the 1993 assassination of a Roman Catholic cardinal at the Guadalajara airport.

In last week’s issue of Zeta, Blancornelas, citing federal investigators, identified “C.H.” as an assassin for the Tijuana cartel and accused him of taking part in the Nov. 14 murder of two Mexican soldiers, who were commissioned as federal police agents, as they sat in a Chevrolet Suburban outside the federal courts in Tijuana.

For years, Zeta has been denouncing the Arellano Felix drug gang and its violence along the U.S.-Mexico border. The magazine has also denounced corruption inside the government stemming from Mexico’s expanding drug trade.

Three journalists have been slain this year in Mexico, lagging behind only Colombia’s four deaths so far in 1997. Mexico also has reported an alarming number of non-fatal attacks against journalists - at least 20 this year, including several beatings.

Bill Orme, director of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, on Friday urged the government to conduct a thorough investigation.