For three years, journalists Alejandra Sánchez Inzunza and José Luis Pardo Veiras traveled more than 34,000 miles through 18 Latin American countries in a third-hand Volkswagen Pointer. Their objective: to tell the story of the region’s cocaine route.
Following the October murder of Mexican photojournalist Edgar Esqueda in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, a cellphone video sent to a former police officer spread on the internet. It showed Esqueda, bound and on his knees, offering the names of crime reporters at newspapers across the state. In response, San Luis Potosí Gov. Juan Manuel Carreras ordered immediate protection measures—a police patrol car for every reporter named in the video.
Though the number of journalists killed for their work decreased globally in 2017, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) noted one exception: Mexico.
Mexico and Brazil are among the countries that saw the highest increases in impunity ratings in cases of murders of journalists over the past 10 years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and its 10th Annual Global Impunity Index.
In the course of 9,190 miles and four months, reporters Bob Fernandes and Bruno Miranda visited four Brazilian states to find out who pulled the trigger and who ordered the firing of 36 shots that killed six Brazilian journalists in iconic cases for the country's press.
A cameraman who reported receiving death threats was killed in western Honduras on Oct. 23.
Following her murder on March 23, 2017 in Chihuahua, Mexico, journalist Miroslava Breach has entered the tragic list of communicators who have been targeted by violence in Latin America for bringing to light the illegalities of criminal groups and public power in the region.
A Guatemalan court sentenced Sergio Waldemar Cardona Reyes to 30 years in prison for the 2015 murder of journalist Danilo López.
The Colombian National Police is being accused of potentially being responsible for two separate attacks on press freedom on Oct. 8.
Mexican photojournalist Edgar Daniel Esqueda Castro was found dead on Oct. 6 in San Luis Potosi in central Mexico, a day after being kidnapped by men who allegedly identified themselves as police officers.
“It’s been 17 years of this red accounting (cuenta roja) in which we have not stopped counting the number of journalists killed. There are 109, and a good part of them in the last two administrations,” said Daniela Pastrana, director of Mexican journalists organization Periodistas de a Pie. “But the counting began, paradoxically, with the start of the democratic transition. That is one of the things that I still cannot explain.”
The press in Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, no longer conducts investigative journalism following the death of Javier Valdez, a journalist from the Sinaloan weekly newspaper Ríodoce, who was killed on May 15 of this year.