Giordano: LA Times Reporters Jump on the Coffin of 14-Year-Old Javier Cortés in Atenco to Invent an Untrue Story
May 7, 2006
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Al Giordano reports from Mexico on the astonishingly dishonest reporting from L.A. Times correspondents Sam Enriquez and
Carlos Martinez on the government repression in Atenco:
"The yet-to-be-determined body count of those killed, disappeared, beaten, raped and imprisoned from the three-day
police riot and house- to-house round-up of dissidents in and near San Salvador Atenco, Mexico, included the
assassination, last Wednesday, of a 14-year-old boy.
"Javier Cortés had been pronounced dead that afternoon and, immediately, officials from the government invented a myth
designed to protect the assassins - its police forces - and to assign blame, instead, to protesting townspeople: They
claimed that Cortés' own neighbors, during a highway blockade, threw a 'firecracker' that killed him as he walked to his
grandfather's house. The state prosecutor then snarled that he would bring homicide charges, too, against the protest
leaders.
"The autopsy results, when they were finally released, proved the official story to be false: A police bullet killed
Javier Cortés.
"And two Los Angeles Times reporters, Sam Enriquez and Carlos Martínez, knew it - the news had already been published in
Mexico - when they filed a story about the boy's Friday funeral, published on Saturday.
"The LA Timesmen knowingly chose to withhold that fact from their newspapers' readers, while inventing other claims
that, a Narco News investigation reveals, are baseless and malicious, which is to say, what Enriquez and Martínez
reported was knowingly false."
Read the full story, here:
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin