The word "mismatch" hardly begins to describe it. In one corner we have Banamex, the National Bank of Mexico, a massive financial institution just purchased by Citigroup for a whopping $12.5 billion. In the other corner, we have a guy with a laptop.

That guy is Al Giordano, a Boston native now of no fixed address, and the product of his laptop is Narco News (www.narconews.com), a Web site established in April 2000 to publish dispatches from all over Latin America about the drug war and its fallout. Among those dispatches has been a fair bit of investigative reporting: a piece detailing the various conflicts of interest that led to the resignation of an Associated Press correspondent in Bolivia, for example, and another on dark truths about Colombian paramilitary chief Carlos Castano.

Narco News also has published the allegations of a Mexican journalist named Mario Menendez Rodriguez, who reported in his Merida-based paper Por Esto that Banamex president Roberto Hernandez Ramirez was a narcotics trafficker. Por Esto's reporters amassed evidence that drugs were being bought and sold on Hernandez's many properties in Quintana Roo, including interviews with local fishermen who claimed to be eyewitnesses--not to mention the bags of cocaine literally washing up on the beach. To quote Giordano's narco-centric prose style, Hernandez, on top of his duties at Banamex, was "a narco-banker" and a "narco-traficante."

Banamex was not narco-pleased. After Giordano and Menendez traveled to New York in March to speak about the Hernandez allegations, among other subjects, the bank brought a libel suit against Giordano, Menendez and Narco News itself.

The Banamex lawsuit, which began hearings on July 20, is raising eyebrows in media-watchdog circles. Narco News, which is written in Mexico and run off a Web server in Maryland, is being sued in New York on a tenuous pretext; namely that it is "affiliated with" (read: linked to) the New York-based Web site mediachannel.org.

Much about the lawsuit is patently ridiculous, says Narco News' lawyer Tom Lesser, starting with its whereabouts. "This is a lawsuit brought by a Mexican corporation against two people, one of whom [Menendez] is a Mexican resident, and one of whom [Giordano] lives in Mexico presently, over events that occurred in Mexico," Lesser says. "The lawsuit should be in Mexico."

In fact, the lawsuit has already been in Mexico, and more than once. In two separate cases, Mexican judges have tossed out similar lawsuits by Banamex against Menendez and Por Esto, ruling in both cases that the paper's charges were legitimate and therefore not libelous.

Lesser suspects that bringing the case to the Big Apple has nothing to do with proving libel. The goal of Banamex, he fears, is to drain the coffers of Giordano and Menendez, and caution anyone else who might have unpleasant things to say about the bank. "I think they want to cause Giordano to spend so much money and so much time that he has no resources to give to the Web site," Lesser says, "so he will not print stories in the future which raise issues concerning the bank."

Or as Narco News correspondent Peter Gorman put it in an open letter to readers, soliciting contributions to Giordano's already sorely depleted legal defense fund, "Hernandez knows that neither Por Esto nor Giordano have enough between them to buy him lunch. What he wants is to do is shut them down."

The heart of the Banamex lawsuit, which asks for unspecified damages on counts of libel, slander and "interference with prospective economic advantages," is that the "defendants published the statements knowing they were false, and/or with reckless disregard for the truth."

This charge, Lesser says, may be the most laughable part of the whole affair. To win, Banamex would "have to prove that Giordano and Menendez made these statements with a reckless disregard of the facts--and that they said it with malice. But Menendez published 40 photographs. He published photos of eyewitnesses. Giordano did separate interviews; he investigated it. He absolutely believed it was a legitimate story."

Lesser has some trouble with the idea of "interference with prospective economic advantages" as well. "The bank just got bought for $12.5 billion by Citigroup. What, without this they would have gotten $13 billion? This is an enormous corporation. The sky is the limit. Banamex is used to having its way in Mexico and assumes it can have its way anywhere in the world. It's the 800-pound gorilla. And Giordano and Menendez had the temerity, the sheer chutzpah to suggest that the president of the company did something wrong."