‘Any Journalist Could Be A Target’

In El Paso, Texas — where residents can get their local news from outlets like the El Paso Times, a newspaper founded in 1881 — journalism is just another profession. 

Drive nine miles away, across the border into Mexico, and journalism is something else entirely: The kind of work that can get you killed. As it has already this year for reporters like José Luis Gamboa in Veracruz and Margarito Martínez and Lourdes Maldonado in Tijuana, victims of what other journalists say is a wave of violence that drug gangs and corrupt officials are using to silence reporters across the country.

There have, in fact, been so many killings over the past few weeks and months that hundreds of journalists gathered in Mexico City in recent days, to take part in a protest calling for the government to do more to help. It was one of a nationwide series of protests over the scores of killings that have, in fact, turned the country into the deadliest in the world for journalists, according to Reporters Without Borders.

According to the advocacy group Article 19, 145 journalists were killed in Mexico between 2000-2021. The victims include Israel Vázquez, a 31-year-old journalist who in the final hours of his life last year was working on a story about human remains found in a church in the city of Salamanca. As he was about to go live for a broadcast on Facebook, a pair of gunmen drove by and shot him to death.

Dutch journalist Jan-Albert Hootsen, a Mexico City-based representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), told me he was present for the gathering of journalists in the capital city last month to protest atrocities like that one, and that the protest was “one-of-a-kind” — like nothing he’d seen before.

“There is fear, uncertainty and doubt among reporters,” Hootsen said. “Many do not know whether there will ever be justice in the killings of their colleagues and therefore believe that the killings will almost certainly continue and the frequency with which they occur will likely increase.”

The reality, he continued, is that governments in Mexico often “make symbolic gestures to get rid of immediate pressure and then just sort of let the noise die out and go about their business. The federal government certainly doesn’t seem to be genuinely interested in doing something.”

The most recent murders underscore that concern. Gamboa — who founded and edited multiple news websites in addition to publishing news to his Facebook page — was stabbed to death in mid-January. Also last month, Martínez, a 49-year-old photojournalist who covered police and crime, was shot to death outside his home in Tijuana. Maldonado, who’d written for several major Mexican news outlets, was likewise found outside her home, shot to death in her car.

In her case, a rare breakthrough came this week: Mexican authorities actually announced the arrest of three people allegedly linked to the crime.

“A friend of mine, who has nothing to do with journalism, called me almost crying and begged me to let her buy a bulletproof vest for me,” Aline Corpus, a general assignment reporter in Baja California, told me. That moment, that conversation, crystallized for her how bad things have gotten.

“We think the best way to protect journalists would be a conscientious society that defends freedom of expression. But in Mexico, we are far from there.”

Complicating the picture even more, and compounding the fears of journalists like her, is feeling that the government doesn’t seem sufficiently motivated to reverse the trend. Along these lines, data from the US Department of State shows that 94 percent of crimes committed in Mexico are never reported or investigated.

“Killing is cheap in Mexico,” freelance photojournalist Guillermo Arias told me. “It doesn’t matter if you’re a journalist or not, very few pay for it. All due to a deeply corrupted justice system built (over) years and that now seems almost impossible to fix.”

Roberto Toledo, in Mexico’s western state of Michoacan, was another of the journalists killed so far this year. According to the CPJ, he was a camera operator and video editor for news website Monitor Michoacán. He was shot to death at the end of January.

To be a journalist in Mexico, reporters like Arias will tell you, is to balance a passion for bearing witness against “a constant struggle for a living wage, and the deep feeling that you can become the next victim in a long list. Just because.” Be that as it may, Arias plans to start his day tomorrow the same way he did today:

He’ll wake up, God willing, and if he has no assignments pending he’ll start to check for spot news. He’ll listen to what’s being reported on the radio. He’ll peruse news sites. And then, he says, the news will take him where he needs to go. “Ever since I took my first images when I was a teenager, something inside me changed. Somehow, the possibility to show life happening through images gives me a purpose.”