After a haystack full of unfulfilled political promises, Mexico’s Senate March 13 finally approved a constitutional amendment making attacks on journalists a federal crime. This came after years of public pressure, both here and abroad, especially from news gatherers and their supporters in this country, where 51 journalists were killed from 2000 to 2011, according to the latest figures from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. That number is disputed by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, and numerous journalists. The Human Rights Commission presently places the number at 74, since President Felipe Calderon launched his “war on drugs” in December 2006. That move now is widely considered precipitant by international law enforcement experts, by Mexican journalists, even by members of his own administration. Such critics generally agree that he should have taken a year to shake-out and coordinate the nation’s law enforcement agencies, the judiciary and the military, preparing them to launch an unprecedented nationwide anti-crime campaign. “He bit off way more than he could chew,” as one U.S. drug cartel analyst has said. Clearly journalists in Mexico, and elsewhere, agree with that.
One of the reasons for different KIA/MIA numbers by different organizations is that so many journalists have simply disappeared. Some have quit and moved with their families to different, safer places in Mexico. Some have (legally) moved to the United States, some have “disappeared” — kidnapped and never heard of again. This often happened under the 71-year rule of the politically resurgent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), particularly in the 1960s and ‘70s.
And while this new amendment, which still has to be approved by at least 17 of Mexico’s 31 states, is being widely applauded, there are more than a few dissenters. In 2006, a Special Prosecutor’s Officer was created to investigate crimes against the freedom of expression classified as federal offenses. That office never solved a single murder involving a journalist. With the openness with which drug cartelistas have killed journalists, that seems a near impossible achievement.
Enthusiastic supporters of the new amendment maintain that by making the murder of a journalist a federal crime, the government is 1) taking such offenses out of the hands of state and local law enforcement personnel, including judges, who often are corrupt or inefficient, or both, and 2) upping the punishment.
Yet, as Eugenio Herrera, general counsel for Grupo Reforma, Mexico’s largest newspaper publisher, notes: “... (W)e have higher prison punishments for kidnapping, for drug trafficking and that doesn’t seem to deter criminals from committing those crimes.” And a large assortment of innately curious and probing journalists point out that a useful result depends on several contingencies that seem to unrelentingly maim Mexico’s justice system. Two of the most obvious: Will the perpetrator of the crime ever be arrested, and 2) will the inefficient and corruption-riddled judiciary system ever find him guilty? Such journalists point out that 80 percent — four out of five — of homicides in Mexico go unpunished.
“Mexico has the dubious distinction of being tied for first place with Pakistan as the world’s deadliest country for journalists,” noted Gillian Slovo, president of the English branch of the PEN International Association which defends freedom of expression. She and others were in Mexico City last month as a part of a PEN International delegation that, in collaboration with Mexico PEN, drew worldwide attention to the culture of impunity. What this delegation found, of course, was “the way in which competing drug cartels, inept or corrupt government, the police and terrified media join together in the suppression of free expression.”The laws are already there. But the protection isn’t. Reading the Mexican Constitution is a generally reassuring experience. It’s simply that — like the problems the U.S. is experiencing — the intentions of the Constitutional tenets are either ignored or have been so diseased by misuse that they’ve become meaningless. But the affliction that has wounded those tenets has not. “Theologians and moralists had conceived of evil as an exception and a transgression,” Mexico’s Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature, Octavo Paz, wrote. But a journalist working even for a modest/small newspaper, covering the events of small communities, quickly finds, as Paz also noted, a surprising and sobering ubiquitousness. A journalist reporting on an accident in which two people are killed and another gravely injured, all cut down by vehicle traveling at nearly 200 kilometers an hour. The driver, a friend of the local mayor, is not detained.
In such a case, and in a small community, a reporter is faced with some hard choices. If the story is pursued thoroughly, any relationship with local government, an important source of information on future stories, will be lost, not just for the journalist, but probably for the newspaper. But the matter of retribution often carries more weight. In small communities, even petty officials have large amounts of power. And invariably they believe they deserve a demonstrable amount of respect beyond that of “ordinary” citizens. They protect political party colleagues, friends, business associates and relatives — which in a nation with large extended families, can cut a broad swath. And, like all politicians, they seldom like the media. Journalists tend to look for the truth, even revelatory bits and pieces. That “odd affliction” makes officials of all kinds nervous, no matter how smilingly they deny that fact. In Mexico, which is still new to true democracy, and in states with a history of ignoring Mexico’s transparency law (considered by local and state officials a frivolous nuisance) reporters often can find themselves in trouble.
A local example: The modest, but popular Spanish-language Chapala newspaper, El Charal, which closed November 2010. Its editor, Hector Sabas del Muro, born in 1941, lived through decades that saw many newspapers shut down for their outspokenness. None the less he attempted — when it wasn’t absolutely suicidal — to act as an advocate of freedom of expression. This often placed him in hot water not only with local burghers and politicians, but with drug producers and dealers. When a meth lab at the edges of Jocotepec’s costly malecon was busted, a young El Charal representative had his life threatened if he reported anything about the event. And shortly before the paper was closed, knowledgeable Chapala sources said that Del Muro had had a pistol placed to his head and was told not to print a word of some the goings-on taking place locally. Though it was known that the 69-year-old Del Muro wasn’t in the best of health when he closed his paper, gossip sprouted that he had closed El Charal because of threats.
Many editors in towns and cities at the mercy of drug cartel thugs have simply stopped reporting drug-related stories in order to keep their employees, and themselves and their families, alive. The silence has been filled, in part, by the social media. But even social media users have been killed.
Another much ignored reason for journalists’ circumspection was recently addressed by the London-based free expression group, Article 19, which reports that 70 percent of aggressions against the media here is government inspired.
The beginning of the campaign for president and hundreds of other officials began yesterday, March 30. Already there have been reports of drug gang threats against candidates. In Nuevo Leon state, in some 20 municipalities candidates for the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) have been forced to quit. Threats come from gangs that “are letting only one party in,” said a senior official of the PRD, referring to the former ruling party, PRI, which is expected to win.
The Reuters news organization has submitted public information requests to all states and the federal government to determine how many complaints have been filed in recent years against drug gangs’ attempts to influence elections. No agency reported any complaints. Not even officials in Tamaulipas, where the popular PRI candidate for governor was assassinated in 2010.