When you think about the situation of journalists in Mexico, the first image that comes is one of violence. And for good reason. The country is considered the most dangerous in the American continent to practice this profession. In 2017 alone, at least 11 journalists have been recorded as killed for reasons related to their work.
“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.
Juan Carlos Hernández Ríos, 29, was shot dead upon arriving at his home on the night of Sept. 5 in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. The killers were two unknown men who, according to the neighbors, had been waiting for him for hours. Hernández died in the hospital, reported Mexican site Sin Embargo.
Mexican journalist Cándido Ríos Vázquez was killed in southern Veracruz on Aug. 22, 2017 despite being under the federal government program to protect journalists.
Almost a decade ago, Brazilian journalist Marcelo Moreira traveled to Mexico for the first time to participate in a working group to study the situation of journalists in that country, considered then and now the most dangerous place to practice journalism in Latin America.
A Mexican radio journalist in the state of Puebla is recovering after an attack on his life.
Valuing journalistic work in Mexico, ending impunity of attacks against journalists and strengthening the guild are the preliminary objectives of the participants of the working groups of the #AgendaDePeriodistas initiative, which seeks to create an organization and a working plan to combat violence against the press in that country.
By Teresa Mioli and César López Linares Nine years after he fled to the United States out of fear for his life, former Mexican journalist Emilio Gutiérrez Soto has been denied asylum in an El Paso immigration court. Gutiérrez, a former reporter at El Diario del Noroeste in the state of Chihuahua, finally had the […]
A federal judge in Mexico said that MVS Radio's cancellation of the program of journalist Carmen Aristegui, which she hosted at ones of its stations for more than six years, was "illegal," according to the journalist’s lawyers.
In his more than 30 years as a journalist, Jorge Ramos has dedicated himself to holding power to account, to being a rebel, to disobeying, something he advises the next generations of journalists to do. Ramos, winner of the 2017 Recognition of Excellence of the Gabriel García Márquez (GGM) Journalism Award, has been committed to "causing discomfort and [doing] it through journalism,” as Venezuelan journalist Laura Weffer explains.
Enrique Benjamín Solís Arzola, former mayor of Silao, Guanajuato, Mexico, was sentenced to two years in prison for ordering the attack on journalist Karla Janeth Silva Guerrero, from the newspaper Heraldo de León, in September 2014. Solís Arzola is the first public official to be sentenced in the country for assaulting a journalist, according to Animal Político.