MEXICO CITY — Jesus Blancornelas, the pioneering border journalist who braved assassination attempts and death threats to expose the inner workings of Tijuana's murderous drug cartels, died Thursday of natural causes. He was 70.
Suffering for months from the effects of stomach cancer, Blancornelas died in a hospital in Tijuana, the city where his Zeta magazine, founded in 1980, had earned him fame as "the spiritual godfather of modern Mexican journalism."
In 1997, after daring to first publish the photograph of drug lord Ramon Arellano Felix, Blancornelas escaped an assassination attempt by cartel gunmen that left four bullets in his body. His bodyguard was killed.
"He never sold out, and he always stayed relevant," said Francisco Bazan Penaloza, president of a Tijuana lawyers association.
"With his work, he raised high the name of Mexico in the world."
Blancornelas wrote about the drug cartels for decades, even as the mafias intensified their war on muckraking journalists who dared to report on their activities.
"Today there are cities where journalists work as if walking through a minefield," Blancornelas said in a speech last May accepting his second National Journalism Prize, Mexico's highest journalism honor. "Other companions work every day watchful of tragedy.... We should show our solidarity with them. They are going through hard times."
Born in the central Mexican state of San Luis Potosi, Blancornelas began his career as a sportswriter in the mid-1950s. He moved to Tijuana in 1960.
His stories on the corruption of border officials forced him out of three newspapers before he co-founded the weekly ABC in 1977. His exposes riled Baja state officials so much that they sent police to take over ABC's office in 1979 on the pretext of intervening in a labor dispute.
Blancornelas fled to San Diego and unsuccessfully applied for political asylum in the United States. In San Diego, he co-founded Zeta with colleague Hector Felix Miranda in 1980. They distributed the magazine across the border and eventually returned to Tijuana.
In 1985, a Zeta cover story on a warehouse filled with marijuana and guarded by local police broke the story of the arrival of the Arellano Felix brothers, who would become the leaders of the Tijuana drug cartel.
Blancornelas would say later he did not realize the significance of the story until plainclothes police officers bought all 20,000 copies of the magazine off the streets in a clumsy effort to stifle the news. Zeta republished the issue, with the headline "Censored!" blaring on the cover.
