Some 200 people are working on the publication "No se mata la verdad matando periodistas" (Don't Kill the Truth by Killing Journalists), a book that will tell the stories of 126 killed or disappeared reporters and press workers in Mexico since 2000, according to Reporte Índigo.
The goal of the book is to keep the cases of killed journalists from being forgotten, said editor Alejandro Vélez. At this writing, only one case has been solved of the 67 journalists reported killed in Mexico since 2006.
Financing for the project comes from online donations. Publishers want to distribute copies of the book to donors and attendants at the November 2012 Guadalajara International Book Festival. The organization Our Apparent Surrender (NAR in Spanish) hopes to raise more than $16,000 to publish the book. So far, the group has raised $6,800.
NAR's first project was a website in memory of the 72 Central and South American immigrants killed in Mexico. Their bodies were found in August 2010 in the border state of Tamaulipas. The stories of killed or disappeared journalists include family photographs, notes of what they published before their death, threats they received, and inconsistencies in the investigations into their killing or disappearance, Catalán editor Lolita Bosch told El Cultural.
The freedom of expression organization Article 19 declined to participate in the book project due to a dispute over the reported number of 126 disappeared or killed journalists, according to the website Sin Embargo. Article 19 counts 72 cases of journalists killed since 2000, including just those cases where the evidence suggests the crime was committed in reprisal for journalistic coverage. The group believes there is doubt in the remaining cases whether the killing was connected to the reporter's work.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
