A Fifth Journalist Was Killed in Mexico This Year
Police officers guard the perimeter of a scene where Heber Lopez, an independent journalist who ran NoticiasWeb, was shot dead in Salina Cruz, in Oaxaca state, Mexico. Photo: Reuters
Yesterday, Mexico lost its fifth journalist this year. Heber Lopez, the director of Noticias Web, was killed at his office in Oaxaca. Since the beginning of 2022, four others — Roberto Toledo, Lourdes Maldonado López, Margarito Martínez, and José Luis Gamboa — have also lost their lives. Several more have been injured, making it the deadliest six weeks for journalists in Mexico in a decade.
Mexico has historically had a high rate of violence and homicide, and journalists have been a common target. Due to this, a government policy to put media workers under state protection has reached a count of 500. The protection ranges from bodyguards to surveillance. However, several of the killed journalists were part of the program, meaning it ultimately failed to secure their safety.
The government has also failed at responding to explicit warnings. Many journalists had reported threats or physical attacks against them in the past, even years before they were killed. "[It] is something that happens very often. Journalists tell the authorities that they're in trouble, they tell them that they're receiving threats, but more often than not, the response by the Mexican government is simply silence,” Jan Albert Hoosten of the Committee to Protect Journalists explains. “Nothing is done about it."
This governmental indifference has reverberating repercussions on the media in Mexico. Falko Ernst, a International Crisis Group analyst, explains that “what makes such a wave of journalist killings possible is that criminal interests – through government inertia, complicity or direct authorship – are almost never properly investigated or punished. There’s near-perfect impunity.”
Police officers guard the perimeter of a scene where Heber Lopez, an independent journalist who ran NoticiasWeb, was shot dead in Salina Cruz, in Oaxaca state, Mexico. Photo: Reuters
Many have shifted the blame towards President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Thirty-three journalists have been killed since AMLO took office at the end of 2018, but he has consistently responded to their deaths with verbal attacks against the media and its alleged intentions to target his administration. His deflections include framing the issue as one created by neoliberalism, and accusing his political opponents of capitalizing on the crisis.
There has been some level of international disapproval as well as domestic anger. Protests led by journalists demanding safety for their coworkers have spread to over 65 cities. And their concern is valid: between 2001 and 2021, around 145 journalists were killed in Mexico. And the situation is escalating. The death count in 2021 was seven, the highest in the world. A month and a half into 2022, there are already five.
The violence towards journalists stems from gang violence. Targeted reporters tend to have written on various cartels, or their connections to public officials. Ever since the war on organized crime began in 2006 and the government deployed the military, gang violence exploded, and with it, the number of journalists that were harrassed, attacked, or killed. Coupled with corruption, a failing justice system, and an apathetic government, the lives of media workers are continuously at risk. Armando Linares, director of news outlet Monitor Michoacán, laments, “We don’t carry weapons. We only have a pen and a notebook to defend ourselves.”