EFE.- Without knowing it, the reporter Pablo Reinah was part of the most notorious police montage in Mexico when he covered in 2005 the false arrest of the French Florence Cassez. Almost two decades after the scandal that cost him his job, he regrets that the Mexican authorities continue to orchestrate media productions.
“The authority lied, but more than lying to the media, what it did was lie to public opinion and that cannot be repeated, although it has been repeated. We cannot remain silent, ”said Reinah in an interview, who has just published The Florence Cassez case. My testimony (Aguilar) to write down his version of what happened 16 years ago.
This reporter was one of the most recognized faces of Televisa’s morning newscast when, at dawn on December 9, 2005, he received a tip-off from Luis Cárdenas Palomino, high command of the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI) —today imprisoned for torture—, so that went to the dismantling of a gang of kidnappers.
He told her there was a French woman involved. “That’s news,” defends the journalist. Therefore, he agreed with his bosses to go cover the raid.
For posterity was the recording in which the reporter enters with highly armed police officers in a ranch, where they arrest Florence Cassez and his partner, Israel Vallarta, alleged members of the band Los Zodiaco, whom Reinah interviews live, and they release three alleged hostages.
What should be coverage and a “normal day” were not.
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Mount is uncovered
And it is that two months later, the director of the AFI, Genaro García Luna – currently imprisoned for drug trafficking in the United States – confessed in an interview that Cassez and Vallarta had been captured another day in a different place, and affirmed that the operation was simulated at the request of the press.
The network decided that heads should roll and fired Reinah, with 10 years of experience in Televisa, for having put “the credibility of the company at risk.”
“Of course I felt helpless because a company that should have supported me, a company for which I always worked honestly, preferred to support power,” reproaches the journalist.
Reinah, current presenter of Uno TV, launched a legal battle supported by the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), with which he managed to get the Prosecutor’s Office to recognize in 2007 that the press had been lied to in the Florence Cassez case.
“We were all part of that deception and we should all have raised our voices, not just me,” he dedicates to his fellow professionals.
To this day, Reinah maintains that he knew nothing of the bizarre montage and that he saw nothing unusual in the picturesque raid that allowed him to interview those arrested even before the police questioned them.
He maintains that he “could not have done something different”, since he limited himself to narrating what was happening.
“Dozens of journalists arrived at the scene and none reported a montage the next day. There was no way. We are not experts, nor is it our job or the usual thing for the authority to deceive you. The authority must provide reliable data ”, he claims.
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The montages don’t end
He suspects that García Luna orchestrated that theater to clean up the image of an AFI damaged by a previous case of torture, and he regrets that these productions continue to take place.
For example, when the former director of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) Emilio Lozoya was extradited last year, the Prosecutor’s Office used a double to make the press believe that they took him to jail but in reality they transferred him to a hospital.
“By trying to deceive the media, they deceived public opinion and public opinion should not be deceived,” he says.
The Supreme Court freed Florence Cassez in 2013 for violations of her procedural rights and after a diplomatic conflict between Felipe Calderón’s Mexico and Nicolas Sarkozy’s France.
Reinah recalls that during the few minutes she met Cassez, she gave him “the impression that anyone accused of something gives you: she was scared.”
Almost two decades later, he refuses to give his opinion on whether the Frenchwoman was innocent or guilty. “He did not return to his country because of his guilt or because of his innocence. He returned to his country because due process was violated, ”he recalls.
His partner at that time, the Mexican Israel Vallarta, did not suffer the same fate and has been imprisoned in preventive prison for 16 years and without any type of sentence.
“This can not be. There has to be an explanation of why a sentence has not been given and why he has not been found totally guilty or totally innocent ”, he condemns.
And regarding the three alleged kidnapped, including a child, whom many consider actors in the farce, he prefers to maintain the presumption of innocence: “If they were kidnapped, they are victims. You have to have a thorough investigation ”.
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