The Mexican Senate this month passed a bill to bolster failing protections for human rights activists and journalists working in the country. The bill, a modification to Section 21 of Article 73 of the Mexican Constitution, had already passed Congress’s lower house. Now, 17 states need to ratify it to baptize it as law of the land.
More than 40 journalists have been killed or have disappeared in Mexico since the launch of the drug war in 2006, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based independent nonprofit organization. Other groups, such as Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), give a higher figure – around 70. These numbers have put Mexico up in CPJ’s top ten most dangerous countries worldwide to practice the profession.
The new law will move from state to federal jurisdiction all “crimes against reporters, journalists or other people or outlets that affect, limit or reduce the right to information or the freedom of expression or the press,” raising the stakes and reducing the possibility of corrupt local officials overseeing the investigation and prosecution process.
The CPJ keeps a worldwide Impunity Index, a rolling ten-year evaluation of crimes against the press that go unsolved. Mexico ranked eighth most dangerous place to practice journalism in the world last year, with 0.121 unsolved journalist murders per one million inhabitants.
Recent history does not paint a flattering picture for state-level Mexican governments in charge of prosecuting violence against journalists.
Sometimes arrests are made and no trial materializes, as in the case of Alejandro Zenon Fonseca Estrada, a radio host in Villahermosa, Tabasco who was killed while hanging anti-crime posters on the streets one morning in 2008.
Other times, police discover the name of the culprit when he can no longer stand trial. After the 2007 murder of Rodolfo Rincon Taracena, reporter for Tabasco Hoy, also in Villahermosa, several low-level gang members were said to confess to participating in his murder, but identified the actual killer as a man who subsequently died in a gunfight with the police.
The case of Armando Rodriguez Carreon, a crime reporter for the newspaper El Diario de Ciudad Juarez, sums up the situation. Rodriguez was shot to death in front of his eight-year-old daughter in 2008. Both the original federal investigator assigned to the case and his replacement were also murdered in quick succession. With odds like that, it’s no wonder almost all of Mexico’s high-profile journalist murders have gone unsolved.Even when there are arrests and convictions, the cases are often surrounded by whispers or accusations of miscarried justice. In 2007 Amado Ramirez Dillanes, correspondent for Televisa and a radio host, was murdered in Acapulco on his way to his car. Two men were soon captured, and one, Genaro Vazquez Duran, swiftly convicted of the crime, though groups such as CNDH decried the verdict for mishandling of evidence, inconsistencies and manipulation of testimonial evidence, torture of the suspects, and witnesses that could not be placed at the scene and gave false addresses, among other complaints. Vazquez is serving a 38-year sentence for the crime.
So much headlining violence masks subtler control mechanisms. According to a 2010 report on freedom of expression in Mexico by the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS), threats and intimidation are a regular part of crime reporting in many parts of the country. These particular crimes are even more prevalent than statistics show, because “many attacks on local journalists are not formally reported due to a lack of confidence in the respective authorities.” Sometimes, the authorities are the ones making the threats.
All of this outright intimidation has a ripple effect of self-censorship. When Noel Lopez Olguin was murdered in March 2011, presumably for his regular columns railing against local corruption in Veracruz and calling out drug kingpins by name, newspapers for which he had worked, La Verdad de Jáltipan, Noticias de Acayucan and Horizonte, denied his involvement, downplayed his contributions or would not comment in the aftermath of his death.
By its very nature, self-censorship is difficult to track, but several editors and journalists have publicly admitted to doing so as a matter of course. A 2008 report by an International Mission for the Documentation of Attacks against Journalists and Media Outlets interviewed Jaime Marquez Rochin, sub-director of La Opinión of Michoacan, who said, “We do self-censor. It is a chronic form of survival.”
When Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco, 21-year-old photographer for El Diario in Ciudad Juarez, was gunned down in the afternoon parking lot of a mall in 2010, his paper famously ran an editorial titled “What do you want from us?” in which it directly asked those responsible for the crime what they should or should not publish in order to keep their employees out of the crosshairs.
“In some states where there is a major organized crime presence,” the UN/OAS report reads, “self-censorship has reached such serious levels that the local press has been reduced to silence.” Often, in cities such as Reynosa, Tamaulipas, U.S. papers will report on kidnappings of journalists, shootouts and other serious crimes while local papers and radio stations make no mention of them at all.
Some journalists who receive threats quit the profession or seek refuge – either in safer parts of Mexico, such as Mexico City, or in other countries. After the high-profile murder of Bladamir Antuna Garcia, crime reporter in Durango, his son had to drop out of college and get a job. He took a job at a newspaper, and was threatened from the start and nearly abducted. He quickly gave up on the idea.
So far two Mexican journalists, Jorge Luis Aguirre of lapolaka.com and Alejandro Hernandez Pacheco of Televisa, have been granted permanent asylum in the United States. Another, Horacio Najera, now lives in Vancouver, Canada, and several others have fled Mexico and have applied for asylum as well.
Bullying and media manipulation can take other shapes too. The government has been known to exercise its will through advertising pesos. The 2008 International Mission report mentions one case, “Martin Olguin, editor of El Expreso of Hermosillo, Sonora, related how functionaries of the state Congress gave advertising in exchange for favorable coverage.” Olguin’s dilemma hardly stands alone.
Mexico currently has no legislation specifically laying out how the government allocates advertising dollars. As such, Pemex was able to cut off their ads in Contralinea magazine after it ran a series of stories critical of the government-owned petroleum company.
In extreme cases, as in Reynosa, where the local government is widely suspected to be under the thumb of cartels, the government not only doles out advertising dollars to outlets in accordance with their cooperation, but the CPJ estimates that around 90 percent of the city’s reporters receive direct payouts or chayos, from city hall.
The, idea of moving crimes against journalists to federal jurisdiction is not new. The bill that just passed has been around in some form since 2008. President Felipe Calderon back in 2006 created a special federal prosecutor’s office for crimes against freedom of expression.
The office has been able to investigate crimes against journalists (and later against the freedom of expression) in cases where federal laws were violated. However, it notably brought only four cases to trial from 2006 to 2010 and has yet to solve a single murder case since its inception.
Which begs the question, how is this time going to be different? For now, that question will remain, as legislators still have the task of designing and codifying the detailed laws and regulations that set up and direct the federal infrastructure for these crimes, once enough states ratify the bill.
The El Diario editorial plea put the situation in stark relief, black and white – words, maybe, to help draw off a little of the grief, the desperate, leaden sludge seeped over the land by ambition and impunity. “You [the cartels] are right now the de facto authorities in this city, because legal authority has been unable to stop the continuing deaths of our colleagues, though we have repeatedly demanded it of them.”