Politics: Media and freedom of the press under assault from politicians and cartels
When a leader of one of the most powerful drug cartels in Mexico posted in recent days a video threatening the main anchor of a national news service with death if she did not suspend her reporting on the group’s activities, it was just the latest terrifying episode in an extended history of mounting threats and violence against reporters that as of last year made Mexico the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. However, this time it prompted a strong response from communications companies and publications, including some of those that the same Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel (CJNG) that issued the video threat against Milenio’s Azucena Uresti, has tried to silence through intimidation. In paid announcements, they denounced the threat, defending the importance of freedom of the press and insisting in an unprecedentedly assertive tone that it is high time the authorities begin “to guarantee freedom of expression and strengthen democracy in the country, not weaken us by stigmatizing our work.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador quickly responded by assuring he condemned the threats and would do everything to defend all journalists, but for some time there has been an ever wider gap between official promises in this vein, the actions taken and results achieved. Over the past 21 years an extended history of threats and attacks by criminal organizations against the media and journalists has played out, with the annual toll of murdered journalists swelling from four to 277 so far this year and little to show from official efforts to stem that tide.
The violence organized crime inflicts on journalists has fed ever growing “silence zones”, in which the media has been brought to heel, a process that now coincides with a government that also disqualifies some of the media because it perceives it as a threat.
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