South of the border is the deadliest place to be a journalist in the Americas, writes Antonio Castillo. Illustration by Ray Hirst.
In the early hours of January 9, the home of Carlos Velasco Molina, director of El Correo de Oaxaca, was attacked with two Molotov cocktails and, on February 9, the house of Moisés García Castro, the director of the newspaper El Debate, was sprayed with gunfire from an AK-47 assault rifle.
As all Mexican journalists know only too well, a byline can kill. Since 2000, some 24 journalists have been murdered and eight others are missing. These days Mexican reporters covering organised crime are not signing their stories.
On March 4, the leading Mexican political magazine Proceso told its readers it "undertook the policy of protecting its reporters and correspondents by publishing stories on drug traffickers without bylines." Stories are now just signed: "Editorial staff".
Alfredo Jiménez Mota used to sign his stories. The reporter from El Imparcial in Hermosillo, capital of the northern border state of Sonora, was investigating links between state authorities and the Sinaloa drug cartel. He went missing on April 2, 2005. He's presumed dead.
Mexico is the country in the Americas with the largest number of journalists assassinated. "It's a figure one would associate with a war zone, not a vital democracy like Mexico," says the Committee to Protect Journalists. These journalists are killed in daylight, on their way from their offices to their homes and in city centres. Their bodies are dumped in plazas as warnings.
And other warnings come daily. They come via email, text messages, phone calls or via gruesome actions. In June last year, a human head was left near the offices of El Correo de Tabasco newspaper. Two days later, a note with a death threat against the paper's editorial director Juan Padilla was found near the same spot. The newspaper had published investigative stories into migrant trafficking into the US and kidnapping cases.
While the northern border region is the most dangerous place for Mexican journalists, "violence against the media has extended to almost the whole country," says Roberto Rock, former editor of newspaper El Universal.
The situation of Mexican journalists is "complicated not only due to the violence; but also to censorship and corruption," according to Dr Claudia Magallanes, a media academic at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Puebla. She says the main source of danger for journalists is "organised crime and the second is the government."
"We work in an environment of terror and uncertainty," says Proceso journalist Marta Durán. "[In Mexico] justice is easily bought," she says.
"This situation of violence against journalists will only be resolved when impunity ends."
The violence against journalists has forced media organisations to create in-house mechanisms of self-protection. Self-censorship is one of them and is widely despised by reporters; but as Jaime Márquez Rochin, the vice-director of La Opinión de Michoacán newspaper, put it: "We practise self-censorship, it is a typical way to survive."
In other cases, editors are discouraging reporting on drug cartels and avoid covering stories on real estate or car-selling businesses; in the border regions they are businesses connected to organised crime.
Sometimes the stories' narrative has been modified. Alfredo Quijano, editor of El Norte in Ciudad Juárez, a border city infamous for the unsolved murders of hundreds of women since 1993, told The Washington Post that his newspaper now published basic stories with the who, what, where and when, leaving out the why.
"We print the basic news. What the government says. So we are not publishing everything we know, which is not good. But we are trying to survive."
María Idalia Gómez, a journalist and researcher with the Inter-American Press Association, has called on the news media to develop in-house safety protocols for covering risky stories. In a seminar held last year, Idalia Gómez spoke of the "two Ss": "safety in the newsroom" and "safety in the street". When assigned a risky story, only the editor and the head of the news media organisation should be aware of it, she recommended: "Crime stories should be covered by several reporters and sources should only be met during the day and in public places."
Photojournalists have been asked to wear bulletproof vests.
"Photojournalists have been shot just for daring to take photos of narcos having dinner with state governors," adds Marta Durán.
The links between organised crime and authorities have created a climate of total impunity. According to the Global Index on Impunity, Mexico is number 11 of countries with the worst record in unresolved crimes against reporters. "Impunity is institutionalised," states a report of Mexico's National Human Rights Commission.
One of the main problems is that too often the police are on the criminals' payroll. According to a police chief quoted in San Diego magazine last year, 80 per cent of his officers were taking money from the cartels. Another source for the same article asserted that many newspaper editors were also on the gangs' "pad".
Between 2006 and 2008, several high-ranking federal agents and police were arrested due to their links with drug cartels; among them were Noé Ramírez, a former leading anti-drug officer, and Víctor Gerardo Garay, who in 2008 was the acting director of the Preventive Federal Police.
In the border city of Tijuana, the majority of police officers are on the payroll of the Arellano Félix drug cartel, a crime organisation implicated in the 2004 killing of Francisco J. Ortíz Franco, the co-founder of the weekly magazine Zeta.
Carlos Lauría, a senior coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, says organised crime is "clearly using the media to spread a message of fear and terror and making it clear to everyone that there will be consequences for reporting on their activities."
In August 2008, a mission from 13 international press organisations visited Mexico. The mission, including Reporters Without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists and the Inter-American Press Association, concluded that the main obstacles to the work of Mexican journalists were "organised crime, which has generated a climate of fear; corruption; impunity; direct attacks by the police and military forces; and the lack of political will on the part of federal and state governments to resolve cases of assault on journalists and to guarantee their safety."
Mexico is one of the five countries in the world with the highest level of organised crime, and journalists have become caught in the middle of a highly risky news agenda: the coverage of the war between rival drug cartels and the government's attempts to topple organised crime.
In 2006 President Felipe Calderón started deploying thousands of military troops in Mexican cities to topple organised crime. But Calderón's war not only failed, it has increased the level of violence. At least 5000 people have died to date as a result. In this war against organised crime, journalists have been "trapped between the police and the mafia" Alfredo Quijano, editor of El Norte, told The Washington Post's William Booth.
Since 2005 the list of assassinated Mexican journalists has been added to by the disappearance of eight reporters, all likely dead. The missing reporters came from areas that are key corridors for the traffic of cocaine from Colombia and Mexico to the United States - the states of Guerrero, Michoacán and Nueva León. These are regions controlled by the powerful Sinaloa and Gulf drug cartels. In most cases, the missing journalists were investigating the links between public servants and criminals.
According to international journalists' organisations, the number of missing Mexican journalists is comparable to the mid-1990s Russian war on Chechnya, where seven reporters went missing and were never found. Rodolfo Rincón Taracena disappeared on January 20, 2007. An investigative reporter for the Tabasco Hoy, Rincón's whereabouts is still unknown. Raúl Fraga Juárez, a security expert at the Universidad Iberoamericana, sees it as a new tactic for creating fear. "The impact of the murder of a journalist can be short-lived, but the disappearance of a journalist can create an ever present uncertainty," he says.
After more than 20 years of lobbying by journalism and human rights associations, President Calderón introduced a bill on October 28, 2008 seeking to make the killing of journalists a federal crime. The law seeks also to create an ad-hoc attorney-general's office to investigate the murders.
Mexican journalists hope this office will have better results than the special federal prosecutor for crime against journalists created in 2006. That prosecutor has failed to resolve any of the 108 cases under investigation. And, says Marta Durán, there have been cases where threatened journalists have been advised by the institution to "forget and take away the complaint".
Freedom of the press and freedom of expression is enshrined and guaranteed in the Mexican Constitution. This means nothing. It is letra muerta, as we say in Spanish, an ineffective legislation unable to protect the life of Mexican journalists.
Antonio Castillo is a journalist and academic at the Media and Communication Department, University of Sydney
Ray Hirst is an artist with The Advertiser
