In Mexico, the deadliest country for journalists this year, many news outlets have stopped reporting on crime, drug trafficking, and government corruption out of fear of the drug cartels. When the news became increasingly censored, citizens turned to social media to inform the public.
More journalists in Mexico were deliberately murdered because of their profession this year than in any other country, found the International Press Institute. While the number of murdered journalists worldwide decreased by 50 percent from last year, Mexico’s numbers remained the same with eleven victims in both 2009 and so far in 2010. These numbers led many publications to quietly censor their coverage in an effort to avoid violent retaliation for their work.
The increasing media blackout has led many Mexicans to turn to blogs and social media to report the news. Due to the anonymity of websites such as YouTube and Twitter, people are almost completely safe from repercussions by the cartels.
Blog del Narco, one of the most popular “Narco Blogs”, began in March 2010 by an anonymous author. Around the clock, the site receives news updates, videos, and photographs from anonymous sources such as one clip that revealed cartels torturing several police authorities. Bringing nearly 100,000 unique visitors a day, the blog tells about drug cartel movements, gives tips to police forces, and tells of areas to avoid.
In Reynosa, a city of 600,000 people, everything from horrifying violence to municipal corruption goes uncovered by the press due to a combination of intimidation, violence, and bribery by the cartels, said a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Anonymous journalists from Reynosa said in the report, “Now, the cartel thugs are giving orders to city authorities; the cartel is the power telling the press what the people of Reynosa can and cannot know. Censorship is enforced with a gun.”
But in Reynosa, some locals are fighting back and becoming the new voice of the media. Through Twitter, the community is able to warn others about violent or risky situations around town. When a person witnesses or hears about a shoot-out somewhere nearby, they tweet a warning with the hashtag, #reynosafollow, which indexes the tweet. “My contacts tell me there are several policemen of #reynosafollow missing including one named Nolasco,” read one tweet. “Risk in Puerta del Sol Col. Avoid riding through the area,” read another.
While citizen journalists have continued to break through the cartel’s media suppression, many publications have continued to appease them.
On Sept. 17 a photojournalist in Mexico’s most violent city, Juarez, became the 11th journalist in Mexico to be killed this year. The next day the newspaper where the victim had worked, El Diario de Juarez, published an open letter to the cartels asking what the media needed to do, calling the cartels the city’s actual authority.
The article has been viewed as the newspaper’s attempt at stepping out of the cartels’ way in order to avoid future violence.
“We do not want more deaths. We do not want more injuries or even more intimidation. It is impossible to exercise our role in these conditions. Tell us, therefore, what they expect of us as a medium,” said the article.
The article went on to blame Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderon, for the drug war stating that the president had only gone against the cartels to achieve the legitimacy that the polls had revealed he was lacking. Without an appropriate strategy, the president had gone into “a war against organized crime without knowing well the enemy’s dimensions or the consequences this confrontation could bring to the country,” wrote the article’s author.
The numbers from the International Press Institute reveal that 37 journalists have been killed since President Felipe Calderón came to power in 2006.
The public acknowledgment of the cartel’s power in El Diario de Juarez was an uncommon act by the Mexican press. Widespread self-censorship on the drug cartel issue often goes uncovered, found research conducted by the Committee to Protect Journalists. According to the report, nearly all of Mexico’s murders on journalists since 2000 have gone unsolved.
One such case was on Jan. of this year when 29-year-old reporter Valentin Valdes Espinosa was tortured and found dead in the streets of Saltillo, Mexico. After his death, an anonymous senior editor at Valdes’ newspaper, Zocalo de Saltillo, told CPJ that the paper was going to stop reporting on anything about organized crime and that they were not going to investigate into Valdes’ death.
The reporters from Saltillo said Valdes’ murder was to show journalists that anything the cartel does is off limits. According to a CPJ report, the reporters aren’t revealing to the public why Valdes was murdered because self-censorship is in effect. The reporters said there is a pressure from the cartel to write stories that help it, such as stories that invent or magnify human rights abuses by the army.
Leave a Reply to Tracie Cancel reply