Mexico Press Freedom Roundup, week 4, 2022
Mexican journalists take to the streets to protest violence and impunity, while Baja California appoints a special prosecutor to investigate the murders of Margarito Martínez and Lourdes Maldonado.
On january 25, hundreds of journalists took to the streets in dozens of Mexican cities to protest the murders of journalists José Luis Gamboa in Veracruz and Margarito Martínez and Lourdes Maldonado in Tijuana. The protests, the largest of its kind since reporters protested the murders of Miroslava Breach Velducea and Javier Valdez Cárdenas in 2017, were organized by dozens of journalist from across the country, who used groups on messaging apps to agree on a unified message that took social media and headlines of the country’s media by storm.
In Tijuana, a small group of reporters gathered at the Paseo de los Héroes, one of the city’s principal avenues. For them, the protests were deeply personal; most of them knew either Martínez or Maldonado, in some cases both, well. “It’s a terrible thing having to cover the death of a friend,” Jordi Lebrija, a freelance producer and camera operator who works for international media, told me.
His colleague Vicente Calderón, the founder and editor of news website Tijuana Press, drew comparisons to the 1988 protests in Tijuana in the wake of the murder of journalist Héctor Félix Miranda. “You’d think that, with all of the violence we cover, we’d be immune in some way to these kinds of things, but it’s been a terrible week with lots of introspection,” he told me over the telephone.
Raquel Zapién, a freelance reporter based in Mazatlán, in the state of Sinaloa, told me that the protests were “historical in the level of participation y the capacity for free and spontaneous organization by journalists in Mexico.”
On Thursday, Lourdes Maldonado was buried in Tijuana, in the presence of dozens of journalists, including several reporters from international outlets. Several of her family members gave short statements to the press and urged Baja California state authorities to investigate the killing and determine whether it was related to her work.
Special prosecutor
While speculation abounds on who might be behind the killings of Martínez and Maldonado, the Baja California state attorney general Iván Carpio appointed a special prosecutor, Atolo Machado, on Wednesday to investigate both murders. The government of governor Marina del Pilar Ávila als sent a legislative proposal to the state congress to make attacks against the press more severely punishable.
Less impressed by the recent violence against reporters is Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Although he said last week that he regretted both killings and insisted that they would be properly investigated, AMLO, as he is known popularly, resumed his regular verbal attacks on the press on Friday:
“There are very few journalists who fulfill the noble trade to inform,” López Obrador said during his daily morning press conference.
More this week
José Ignacio Santiago Martínez, a reporter based in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, was attacked by unidentified gunmen on January 26. Santiago, who had been assigned a security detail by the federal governmeny due to numerous previous attacks and death threats, told media that he was driving with his bodyguards on an expressway in the Sierra Mixteca, when a taxi carrying at least three armed men began to chase his vehicle. The attackers shot several times at the vehicle of Santiago, who ultimately managed to escape.
The First Chamber of Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled on January 19 that news organizations will be obliged to ‘clearly separate facts and opinions’, as well as that broadcasters can no longer draft codes of ethics, the responsibility of which will now lie solely with the Federal Telecommunications Institute. The National Chamber for the Television and Radio Industry (CIRT) warned on January 20 that the ruling is a direct attack on freedom of expression and said that not allowing media to create their own code of ethics is, in practice, ‘absurd’.