Sixty-six aggressions against the Mexican press were registered during the first quarter of 2014 according to a report published April 22 by the freedom of expression and information organization Article 19.
Only 19 percent of all registered cases of journalists’ homicides and disappearances have been heard by a judge and only 10 percent of those have ended in a sentencing, leaving Mexico’s impunity index at 89 percent, according to the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) in a press release on April 20.
On a typically hot and rainy night in the southwestern part of Guerrero, several gunmen briskly walked inside an Internet cafe owned and operated by a married couple who both practiced journalism.
Three Latin American countries were listed in the latest edition of the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) Global Impunity Index. Mexico, Colombia and Brazil occupied, respectively, the seventh, eighth and eleventh place on the list.
Journalism is still one of the lowest salaried jobs in Mexico, according to data from the 2013 Mexican National Occupation and Employment Survey.
Mexico's Secretary of Interior Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong called the country's Mechanism to Protect Journalists a “failure” that will require restructuring to carry out its responsibilities as established by the law, Proceso magazine reported.
On Wednesday, March 26, four weeks after being kidnapped, beaten and threatened as a result of content published in a magazine he directed, Mexican journalist Gilberto Moreno Fontes took his own life in his home in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, according to news agency Proceso.
Ten days after the sudden resignation of the head of Mexico's Mechanism to Protect Journalists Juan Carlos Gutiérrez Contreras, members of the federal agency's independent advisory group revealed that more than half of the cases of threats and attacks against journalists that the Mechanism has received in the last two years haven't been reviewed yet, Animal Político reported.
A joint mission composed by members of several international and Mexican press freedom organizations reported on March 19 the results of their recent visit to Veracruz to investigate the killing of journalist Gregorio Jiménez de la Cruz, according to digital newspaper Terra.
The first year of Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidency was the most violent year for Mexican journalists since 2007, according to freedom of the press organization Article 19’s annual report published on Tuesday, March 18.
On Sunday, March 16, unknown suspects broke into the Mexico City house of Darío Ramírez, regional director of the freedom of expression organization Article 19. They took his work documents and computers, according to the news site Animal Político.
Three reporters from the news network Noroeste were assaulted in the Mexican state of Sinaloa on Sunday, March 2, after municipal police attempted to disperse a protest supporting the recently captured drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, reported newspaper El Informador.