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Mexico is one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous countries for the media. Drug cartels and corrupt officials are implicated in most of the crimes of violence against journalists, which almost always go unpunished. As a result, journalists often censor themselves and some have to flee into exile.
More than 50,000 troops have been mobilized for the federal offensive against drug trafficking that President Felipe Calderón launched in December 2006. The toll after five years is more than 40,000 dead nationwide, and more than 15,000 in 2010 alone. This undeclared war is being accompanied by a parallel bloody war among the cartels for control of the trafficking. The result has been a tragic deterioration in the working environment for journalists.
Although this situation affects the entire country, the northern states that are the traditional cartel strongholds are the most exposed. The Sinaloa, Gulf and Juárez Cartels have been on the annually updated Reporters Without Borders list of Predators of Press Freedom for years.
Organized crime alone is not responsible for the collapse in the rule of law. The blame must also be shared by authorities who are either complicit or negligent. Human rights violations by the police and army and the corrupt practices of politicians, who are often implicated in drug trafficking, all help to block investigations into crimes of violence against news media and journalists. Eight per cent of the federal police were fired during the last quarter of 21010 on suspicion of colluding with drug traffickers. A survey by Article 19 and the National Centre for Social Communication (CENCOS), blamed 49 per cent of the physical attacks on journalists and media in 2010 on the authorities and 26 per cent on organized crime.
Mexico continues to be the western hemisphere’s most dangerous country for the media, with a total of 80 journalists murdered since 2000 and 14 disappearing since 2003. Mexico and Iraq ranked jointly as the second-most dangerous countries in the world for journalists in 2010, after Pakistan.
Online social network users are no longer safe from reprisals. Maria de Jesús Bravo and Gilberto Martínez Vera spent a month in prison in August and September 2011 for posting alerts on Twitter and Facebook about the possibility of an organized crime attack on a Veracruz school. The charges of terrorism and sabotage initially brought against them were finally dropped. One of the defining moments of 2011 was the murder María Elizabeth Macías, the editor of Primera Hora, a daily based in Nuevo Laredo (in the eastern state of Tamaulipas), who used online social networks and her blog to report about organized crime activities in her region.
None of these crimes has even been properly solved by the police and judicial authorities. The Special Prosecutor’s Office for Crimes against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) has obtained no significant result since its creation in February 2006. The escalating terror has left more and more threatened journalists with no choice but to censor themselves or flee into exile.
There has at least been progress on the legislative front with the decriminalization of media offences at the federal level, promulgated in April 2007. An agreement on the new “protection mechanisms” for journalists was ratified at the federal level in November 2010 but its implementation is still pending.
Updated in September 2011
Mexico now outstrips Colombia in the ranks of countries in which the safety of the media is most under threat on the continent. Not one of the murders or disappearances of journalists since 2000 has really been solved. The drug cartels are not the only ones to blame for this situation.
Mexico now outstrips Colombia in the ranks of countries on the continent where the media is most under threat. The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) has recorded 46 killings of journalists since 2000 and a further eight have disappeared since 2003, either because of their work or most often for an unknown motive. The existence of the drug cartels goes a long way to explain this terrible toll. The start of the 21st Century in fact coincided with a new phase in the expansion of drug trafficking. The federal government, in response to a demand from the USA, was forced to boost control of its airspace by which the drugs reached the northern border. The “narcos”, who since then have been forced to use sea and land routes, have spread out over the country, fighting one another to control routes, infiltrating the apparatus of local government and exposing journalists displaying too much curiosity to greater reprisals. The situation worsened still further after Felipe Calderon took power in 2006, the date of the launch of a massive offensive against drug trafficking that left more than 5,000 dead in 2008, one quarter of whom were killed in the border city of Ciudad Juarez alone. At the height of score-settling between the Juarez and the Sinaloa cartels, combined with a brutal military response, Armando Rodriguez Carreon, of the daily El Diario, who had received several warnings that a contract was out on him, was shot dead on 13 November 2008. His colleague on the same paper, Emilio Gutierrez Issu, who was under threat from a group of soldiers, had decided to flee to the United States a few months earlier and was held in custody by immigration for seven months. Journalists have increasingly been choosing exile as an alternative to continuing to work under threat and not only from the cartels. Corruption on the part of elected officials, sometimes in cahoots with drug-traffickers, or human rights violations by police or the army are other high risk subjects for the Mexican media, especially local journalists. This state of affairs goes a long way to explain the lack of enthusiasm on the part of the executive or the courts to ensure that light is shed on the murder of journalists. Not one of the 46 murders since 2000 has ever really been resolved, as most of the investigations have been mired in irregularities. The special federal court, set up a few months before the election of Felipe Calderon, has produced few results. Between the date of its foundation and November 2008 this Special Court to investigate crimes committed against journalists (FEADP) under the auspices of the justice ministry (Procuraduria General de la Republica) has had 274 cases referred to it. It has handled only 88 and produced results in only three cases. Worst of all, it has frequently closed the file on the most serious ones, particularly those in which governors or their associates are suspected, systematically ruling out any link between the death of or attack on a journalist and their media work. This has especially turned out to be the case in killings in Oaxaca in the south of the country. On the legal front, there have been two major advances to notch up to the start of the Felipe Calderon presidency: decriminalisation of press offences at the federal level, promulgated on 12 April 2007, and the federalisation of murders and offences committed against journalists. This law, unanimously approved in the chamber of deputies on 2 April 2009, is awaiting approval by the Senate.
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