Last month we brought you the story of a group of “hacktevists” in Ciudad Acuna who are embarking on an audacious plan to publicly reveal addresses, photos and documents related to cartel activity in their city, which sits across the Rio Grande from Del Rio.
The group in Acuna - related to the online Anonymous movement, which has been involved in several high profile leaks including the dump of emails belonging to the Austin security consulting group Stratfor - says it began its work to fill in the gaps of local media, which has largely been frightened into silence by the cartels.
Such “zones of silence” have proliferated in recent years along the Texas-Mexico border, with news reporting on the cartels in places like Reynosa, Matamoros and Nuevo Laredo virtually non-existent. In the place of traditional reporting, bloggers, tweeters and other social media users have stepped up to provide basic information about shootouts, deaths and narco-roadblocks. It’s dangerous work, and Mexicans have been killed for doing far less than what the Free Acuna group is doing.
But the reality is that as of now, there are precious few alternatives when it comes to attempting to puncture those silent zones, which increasingly make law abiding residents in those areas feel like they have been abandoned by the rest of the world.
The zones of silence aren’t just problematic for Mexican journalists: U.S. journalists likewise struggle to find ways to safely and responsibly report from these troubled areas, where local officials can’t always be counted on for protection. At the same time, the number of American journalists covering border issues has dropped precipitously over the last decade.
Fortunately, recent years have seen a push for more creative ways to bridge the information gap. The Knight Center for the Americas at the University of Texas has held a series of conferences in which the journalists from both sides of the border have discussed ways to increase cooperation and collaboration.
In the meantime, below is an edited transcript of an email Q&A with the group.
