US immigration urged to grant protection to threatened journalist who fled across border

Reporters Without Borders urges the US immigration authorities to grant an emergency residence permit - followed as soon as possible by political asylum - to Ricardo Chávez Aldana, a radio journalist based in the northern border city of Ciudad Juárez, who was forced to flee across the border with his family to the Texan city of El Paso on 10 December. “The US immigration authorities must be aware of the level of violence in Ciudad Juárez, which has affected security on the US side of the border as well,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Chávez and his family would probably have been murdered if they had not rushed to cross the border. Reporting is a high-risk job when you cover organised crime and Chávez is not the first journalists to opt for exile, and will not the last one. For the sake of his safety, he must be allowed to enter the United States when necessary.” Chávez, who works for Radio Cañon, fled with his mother, wife and son across the border to El Paso after getting a series of phone calls threatening his family, several Mexican newspapers said. On 9 December, the day before he fled, he reported on the air that two of his nephews, Diego and Argenis Chávez Luis, aged 15 and 17 respectively, were among four youths who had just been killed in a shooting in Ciudad Juárez. In his report, he condemned the failure of the authorities to arrest those responsible and the freedom with which gunmen operate in the city. Initially determined to defy the threats, Chávez changed his mind and decided to flee although he does not have a passport. “Before crossing the border with my family, I knew we would be arrested by the immigration authorities but it is better to be locked up than dead,” he told Radio Cañon colleagues by telephone from the US side of the border, according to a report in the newspaper La Jornada. Chávez’s story recalls that of Emilio Gutiérrez Soto, the correspondent of the regional newspaper El Diario, who fled across the border on 15 June 2008 after being threatened by the Mexican army and was held until 29 January 2009 in a detention centre in El Paso. Gutiérrez is now living in the United States, where Reporters Without Borders has been supporting his attempts to obtain asylum. Two other Ciudad Juárez journalists went into exile last year because they were under threat. They are Horacio Nájera, a reporter for the daily Reforma, who has been in Canada since October 2008, and Jorge Luis Aguirre of the online newspaper La Polaka, who fled across the border to El Paso the following month.