Murders in Mexico generate shock, confusion(1)

A Mexican journalist wrote on her Facebook page after the murder of two of her colleagues in Mexico City: "And how do you escape this anxiety, this sensation that nothing we do does any good?"

The brutal murders of Marcela Yarce, 48, and Rocío González, 48, rocked Mexico when their bodies were found Thursday.

Yarce was one of the founders of Contralínea, a political news magazine that regularly reports on government corruption, which has suffered constant harassment in recent years.

The two women were the first female journalists killed in the capital since the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón declared "war" on the drug trade and put the army on the streets shortly after taking office in December 2006.

"Mexican journalists are in mourning, not only because of these killings, but because of all of the murders committed against us," the "Los Queremos Vivos" (We Want Them Alive) collective that organizes protests against attacks on journalists, wrote in an open letter to Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard.

The United Nations considers Mexico the third-most dangerous nation in the world for reporters.

The murders of Yarce and González also drew howls of outrage from other groups of reporters and women's organizations, as well as politicians of all stripes. But, unlike in 2010, when indignation over the kidnapping of four reporters prompted the largest protest demonstration by journalists ever held in Mexico, what has prevailed this time is a sense of shock.

"Every day, something happens that is more appalling than what happened the day before," one radio journalist wrote on Facebook. "We look at this with a sick stomach, thinking of our loved ones, of our country. Grief and rage. What do we do with this sad combination?"

By flinging the armed forces into the crackdown on drug trafficking cartels, Calderón has only worsened the spiral of violence. In the past four years, more than 40,000 people have been killed in increasingly grisly drug-related murders, 10,000 have been "disappeared", 700,000 have been forced to flee their homes, and growing numbers of people have been injured, mutilated, widowed or orphaned.

In the last few weeks, however, the violence has spread to areas that until now had been relatively untouched by the horror.

On Aug. 20, a firefight outside a stadium in the northern state of Coahuila during the live broadcast of a football game led to a suspension of the match. On Aug. 25, 61 people were killed when the Casino Royale in the northeast city of Monterrey was set on fire by unidentified armed men. And now, two women reporters were killed in Mexico City.

Neither of the two was actually involved in reporting work at the time of their deaths. Yarce was head of public relations in Contralínea, and González, a former reporter for Televisa, Mexico's largest television broadcaster, had a currency exchange business.

Their naked, bound and gagged bodies were found in a park in the poor neighborhood of Iztapalapa, on the southwest side of the city, hours after their families had reported them missing. The two women had been beaten and strangled.

Clemencia Correa, a professor at the Autonomous University of Mexico City who specializes in the issue of fear management, said a "policy of terror" is being used to terrify society.

"It is very complex to talk about Mexico today. What we see is that a policy of terror is being implemented, at different levels, and that unlike in the past, when there were state policies against human rights defenders or social movements, now these things are happening to the population in general, in the context of structural impunity," he said.