In Mexico, Reporting the News Is a Dangerous Profession with Little Protection Nicole Ault - The Washington Times
go to original July 6, 2017

Stifled by layers of conflicting interests and corruption, Mexican journalists have little reason for hope (UNESCO)

The working press is under assault as Mexico faces a rising tide of violence generally, fueled in large part by clashes between large and powerful drug cartels. Mexico is experiencing its highest homicide total in two decades as the drug gangs battle over territory.



Considerable unhappiness was aimed at the Mexican government at the panel discussion hosted by the Wilson Center and the Washington Office on Latin America.

This was no low-key, standard-issue think tank briefing: Voices were raised and panelists gestured fiercely as journalists recounted attempts to cover corruption and the country’s brutal drug trade wars while dealing with personal threats, the deaths of colleagues and the incompetence or indifference of the authorities. Ms. Navarro and most of the other panelists spoke in Spanish, through interpreters.

“Our country is murdering journalists,” said Ismael Bojorquez Perea, director of Riodoce, a weekly paper in Sinaloa. His colleague, award-winning reporter and Riodoce founder Javier Valdez, was pulled from his car and shot by a lone gunman on May 15, and prosecutors have told Riodoce nothing, Mr. Perea said.

Days before the journalists assembled in Washington, the discovery of journalist Salvador Adame’s charred remains confirmed the seventh killing of a journalist in Mexico this year. Those seven homicides and almost 90 others since 1992 make Mexico and Colombia the deadliest countries for journalists in North and South America, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

“More of the threats against journalists come from the state than from organized crime,” said Azam Ahmed, bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean at The New York Times.

In a May 2016 report, the Washington Office on Latin America found that 38 percent of presumed perpetrators in cases of harassed journalists were government authorities. Article 19, a British human rights organization, said public officials are thought to be responsible for 226 of the 426 crimes against journalists identified last year — up from 162 just five years earlier.

Even when violence is not used, Mexican reporters face grave threats trying to do their jobs, especially in smaller locales far from the national press corps in Mexico City. Cyberattacks and espionage have been employed against journalists.

Read the rest at The Washington Times

Related: Deadly Words: The Spike in Killings of Mexican Journalists (Foreign Policy in Focus)

Related: Drug War Makes Everyone an Easy Target - Especially Mexican Journalists (Global Voices)

Related: A Deadly Profession: Being a Journalist in Mexico (The World Weekly)

Related: Michoacan’s Attorney General Suggests Reporters Often Killed ‘for Personal Reasons’ (Mexico News Daily)

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