Taking Note
FR
Billionaires Against The Press In June 1999, reports appeared in the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Post, and then several other U.S. dailies about a lengthy document produced by...
...It makes you think about the consequences," El Andar's editor, Julie Reynolds, told us...
...It hasn't protected its researchers," says Schulz, "and hasn't fought back...
...These suits, of course, are meant to stifle freedom of inquiry...
...Whether or not the Justice Department supports him, he told us, will in part be a test of the strength of the Hank family in the United States...
...Former Attorney General Janet Reno went so far as to disavow the NDIC report in a letter last year to former senator Warren Rudman, now an attorney for the Hank family...
...government agencies and outside them, including academics and journalists," in order to gather information for his own research on the drug trade...
...A letter from LNB's lawyers demanded $10 million and the Bank's approval of future articles...
...And the Justice Department has already backed down...
...dailies about a lengthy document produced by the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), implicating one of Mexico's wealthiest and most powerful families--billionaire Carlos Hank Gonzilez, his two sons, Carlos and Jorge Hank Rhon, and their political and financial associates-in drug trafficking and money laundering...
...The suit alleges that Giordano and Men6ndez knowingly made false statements about Hernindez's involvement in the drug trade in Narco News and in interviews given to the Village Voice and New York's WBAI...
...You don't want to deal with these guys...
...Because we consider these attacks on free inquiry important, NACLA will cover these cases-and others-in substantial detail in our July/August Report, a report devoted to the Drug War...
...The magazine had run several investigative followups on the Hank empire following the original reports, and was threatened with legal action if it did not retract a story profiling the Hanks...
...And in December of last year, journalist Al Giordano, the publisher of the on-line magazine, Narco News, and his colleague, Mario Men6ndez, editor of the Yucatan daily paper Por Esto were hit by a lawsuit filed by Roberto Herndndez, the owner of Mexico's largest bank, Banamex...
...government to give him legal counsel, thus far without success...
...The Morning News and Post reports followed by several days the breaking of the story by the Mexican daily, El Financiero...
...He is appealing to his former employers in the U.S...
...You watch yourself...
...Following the threat, LNB had a year to actually file a suit, but in the end, decided not to go ahead with it...
...s our readers know, NACLA has never sympathized with the Justice Department's approach to the Drug War, much less the purposes of the Army War College...
...Now the reporters who wrote those stories are being summoned as witnesses in the discovery phase of a suit brought by Laredo National Bank (LNB), a Texas bank controlled by Carlos Hank Rhon, against Donald Schulz, a political scientist who-LNB claims-leaked the story...
...Herndndez, another PRI loyalist, purchased Banamex in 1991 when the country's banks were being auctioned off by the Salinas regime at bargain basement prices-supplemented, it was later learned, by sizable contributions to Mexico's ruling party...
...Our concern is driven by the belief, if we may quote El Andar publisher Jorge Chino, that "decent journalism matters...
...They are throwing the whole pot of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks," he says...
...They are suing him for defamation of character, invasion of privacy, mail and wire fraud, and even racketeering...
...Army War College, infiltrated the NDIC, provided it with false information about the Hanks and their associates (including LNB) and subsequently leaked that false information to the press...
...Nonetheless the suit against Schulz, part of a larger pattern of harassment of the press by those with money and power, gives us great concern...
...A year before bringing suit against Schulz, LNB threatened to bring suit against a lively Californiabased Latino affairs magazine called El Andar...
...Schulz says he had been legitimately talking "with people both within U.S...
...The NDIC is an arm of the Justice Department charged with producing confidential reports for counternarcotics agencies...
...LNB alleges that Schulz, a former Research Professor at the U.S...
...No matter how intrepid the journalists, harassment by billionaires with access to high-price lawyers and lobbyists can dampen investigation...
...The Hanks, a family long identified with Mexico's former ruling party, the PRI, and closely associated with exiled former president Carlos Salinas, claim to see a "grand conspiracy" here, Schulz says, coordinated by "rogue staffers"-like himself-in federal agencies...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 5
