Journalist John Ross on the 2006 shooting death of Brad Wills, who died filming violent demonstrations in Oaxaca, Mexico.
From the Now magazine article:
Canadian tourists aiming for a quick sun fix have recently become painfully aware of the risks and lack of judicial recourse in lawless Mexico. But those of us who report on the social justice movement from there have always understood that there's a bullet with our name on it.
Independent reporter Brad Will travelled 4,000 kilometres from New York to this violence-torn Mexican city to find his. Forty reporters have been murdered in Mexico since 2000. This is how one of them met his fate.
On the afternoon of October 27, Will, an Indymedia video journalist, had been filming confrontations just outside the city of Oaxaca. He was trapped in the middle of a narrow street while gunshots cracked all around him, but he kept filming, looking for the money shot.
And he found it: on his final bits of tape, you see two perfectly framed gunmen, their weapons firing. You hear the fatal shot and experience Will's shudder as the camera finally tumbles from his hands and bounces along the sidewalk.
Photos taken by Mexican newspaper El Universal at the same moments show the same gunmen. The paper, along with other sources, identified them as cops and local officials.
Did Brad Will film his own murder? Given the evil that lurks within the Mexican justice system, no closure will be possible. Two of those pictured officers were arrested and released, and there's every reason to think Will's killers are riding the streets of Oaxaco, free and seemingly untouchable.
Will was once a fire-breathing urban legend on Manhattan's Lower East Side, living for years in a 5th Street squat and getting dragged out of City Hall dressed as a sunflower to rescue community gardens.
He spent most of 2002 and 2003 roaming the bubbling social landscape of Latin America for Indymedia, the Web experiment born during the WTO Battle of Seattle. In the spring of 2006, the lure of action in Oaxaca drew him there. He bought a 30-day ticket from New York with a return on October 28. He never made the plane.
Here's Will's last video on YouTube.