Correspondent in Mexico
Updated:
Keep
Among the 111,187 intentional homicides registered in the first three years of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s six-year term, one case has shaken public opinion and the media: the murder by bullets in the face of the editor Lourdes Maldonado who cried out for help in 2019 before President López Obrador in his Mañanera. He feared for his life due to a trial against Jaime Bonilla, former governor of Baja California and belonging to the leftist Morena.
The three deaths of journalists, two on the Tijuana border and one in Veracruz, two of the cities hardest hit by the harassment of communicators in just three weeks, have brought together thousands of journalists in 45
cities across the country, in an unprecedented protest for more than a decade. Communication professionals demonstrated this Tuesday to demand justice from the government Mexican with the epicenter in the Ministry of the Interior of Mexico City. And it is that the sister nation represents the most dangerous country in the world, even before Afghanistan, to practice the profession of journalist.
The ‘Article 19’ association affirms that “they are not valid only with the good intentions of the Government” since 143 journalists have been murdered since 2000, about 28 after coming to power of the new administration. The same reactions have not been long in coming: the office in the Mexican nation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN-DH) “regretted and condemned the murder” of Maldonado and the US ambassador, Ken Salazar, “showed solidarity with the murdered journalists.
The massive protests had not been repeated since 2015 when the photojournalist Rubén Espinosa fled Veracruz. It was located, along with four women’s bodies, with various gunshot wounds in the central Narvarte neighborhood, south of the cosmopolitan area of Rome.
The guild still has a long way to go, since it lacks a joint organization to watch over its rights. From the platform ‘We have to talk’ they maintain that “the murders and threats against journalists are forged at the three levels of government, in organized crime, in electoral campaigns and in business interests.” With an attack on an editor every 12 hours, the list would be swelled by dozens of fatalities if we add to fearless and forgotten communicators who perish in gunfights or assaults masked that are not reported as attacks on the right to information.
unprotected
Lourdes, the last fatal victim, was part of a special program of Protection for Journalists, due to the litigation that he defended. Insufficient protection since his murder occurred in the most populated area of the city bordering the United States, at the exit of his home when his escort left his residence, since he did not have 24-hour security.
Many of the threatened professionals are provided with a panic button. However, one of the Veracruz protesters stated that every time she was besieged the last thing on his mind was to activate this mechanism. According to his version, he only warned the authorities or security forces who were, on that occasion, in cahoots with spurious purposes.
Something frequent, as another colleague from Tijuana expressed, in the concentration in which justice was claimed in the capital, where she had to move because she feared for her integrity. And it is that the Human Rights Ombudsman in the area tipped off his harassers about his whereabouts. “We have reached that level,” he moved with despair.
Violence against columnists is intrinsically related to the fight corruption, one of the banners on which the Obrador administration is based. It has just been known that Mexico ranked 124th out of 180 in the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) of Transparency International. The same score as Gabon, Niger or Papua New Guinea. Thus, it ranks last in the OECD due to “no compensation for damage to victims and a lack of recovery of assets diverted by cases of grand corruption.”
www.abc.es
