As part of its campaign Impunity Kills, the Mexico chapter of press freedom organization Article 19 started a launch campaign for both a new documentary and a petition gathering signatures to ask the nation's authorities to fulfill their duties to protect journalists and investigate crimes against them.
At the beginning of 2013, the organization started the campaign by asking President Enrique Peña Nieto to hand over legal powers to Mexico's federal Special Prosecutor for Crimes against Freedom of Expression (Feadle) in order to investigate the cases of these crimes.
Although this objective was achieved, of the cases that the organization had promoted to avoid having them go unpunished, the court "only investigated one," said Article 19 on its website.
In this new phase of the campaign, with the documentary that narrates the case of José Antonio García Apac, the organization intends on collecting new signatures with the objective that Feadle not only investigates García Apac's case, but also the cases of journalists Lydia Cacho and Regina Martínez, who "are at a standstill in the labyrinth of impunity," added the organization.
García Apac was a journalist and the editor of the weekly newspaper Ecos de la Cuenca in Tepalcatepec when he disappeared on Nov. 20, 2006. During a telephone call with his son, the last person he had contact with, his son heard his father being beaten and kidnapped when the car he was traveling in was intercepted. The investigations surrounding his disappearance haven't had any results.
This case adds to eighteen other missing journalists in the country. The petition, directed at the Attorney General of the Republic and the prosecutor of Feadle, Laura Borbolla, can be signed here.
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.
