When authorities minimize the violence against reporters in Mexico
In at least two of the four cases of murdered reporters and media workers since the start of the year, Mexican authorities tried to divert attention away from their work and their job title.
It took Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, the spokesperson of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, just a few hours on Monday to create confusion about the latest murder of a Mexican journalist or media worker in less than a month’s time.
After the news had broken that Roberto Toledo Barrera, a collaborator for news website Monitor Michoacán, had been shot dead in the town of Zitácuaro, west of Mexico City in the central state of Michoacán, Ramírez Cuevas was quick to point out via his official Twitter account that Toledo was not, in fact, a journalist.
“According to judicial investigations, the today murdered Roberto Toledo worked as an assistant at a lawyer’s office, not as a journalist. We condemn this crime. No human being should be robbed of their life. Our condolences to family and friends.”
Ramírez Cuevas’ comments contradicted his earlier tweet that Roberto Toledo was, in fact, a journalist. They also contradicted a statement of Armando Linares, the editor of Monitor Michoacán, who told me on Monday that Toledo was not a reporter, but a ‘collaborator’ who shot and edited video for the website and its Facebook.
Linares added that he had been careful not to call Toledo a journalist in the traditional sense, but that he was definitely someone who provided content for the website.
He also confirmed that Toledo worked as an assistant for Joel Vera, an attorney and friend of Linares’, who is a manager of Monitor Michoacán as well. Toledo was shot dead when he opened the front door of Vera’s office building to several (the exact number is still unclear) armed men.
Ramírez Cuevas made no mention of Toledo’s collaborations with Monitor Michoacán and failed to mention in his tweet that the lawyer’s office he referred to is, in fact, run by a man who also contributes to Monitor Michoacán.
The reason he did so is, I suspect, because acknowledging that Toledo was in any way involved in journalism would make the past month the deadliest for the Mexican press in over a decade, with at least four murders.
It would mean that president López Obrador would have to face the fact that, despite his repeated promises that he would protect journalists, his administration may well become the one with the highest number of murdered journalists in Mexican modern history.
A fight with neighbors that never happened
Ramírez Cuevas was not the only public official who in January made an apparent attempt to change the narrative about a murdered journalist or media worker. On January 17, when photographer Margarito Martínez was shot dead in Tijuana, a story in local news magazine Zeta Tijuana reported that a supposed altercation involving Martínez, neighbors and alcohol was the cause of the photographers murder. That version had supposedly been provided to journalists by Tijuana municipal policemen shortly after the shooting.
Tijuana reporters I spoke with last week when I visited the city, as well as Martínez’s wife and Baja California state prosecutor Hiram Sánchez, quickly clarified that such an altercation never took place. Although Martínez was involved in a dispute over a piece of land allegedly ‘invaded’ by people from the neighborhood, on the day of the murder Martínez had not spoken with them and was, in fact, alone when he was attacked by his murderer.
It is unclear why the police sources told Zeta and other media about a fight that never happened, but the reports had consequences. For several hours after the murder, the version of an altercation with neighbors was the dominant narrative. It wasn’t until the Baja California state authorities made it clear that Martínez may have been murdered because of his work and that ‘no line of investigation has been ruled out’, that the case began to represent a potential serious attack on press freedom.
Denial
Sadly, Mexican authorities have a long history of responding in the immediate aftermath of a journalist’s murder by either denying that the victim was a journalist or by almost instantly telling the press that the killing was unrelated to the reporter’s work.
It happened in 2012 after the murder or Proceso’s correspondent in Veracruz, Regina Martínez, when Veracruz state authorities claimed the killing was a the result of a robbery, a version now thoroughly debunked.
It happened again in 2015, in that same state, when Moisés Sánchez Cerezo, the founder and editor of news magazine La Unión, was abducted and murdered. Then governor Javier Duarte de Ochoa (who was later arrested on accusations of ties to organized crime and graft) flat out denied that Sánchez was even a reporter, instead saying he was ‘just a taxi driver’.
Sánchez did indeed work as a taxi driver. He also worked as a journalist. Reporters having two or even more jobs is common practice in Mexico, where journalism’s wages are notoriously low. It is why Sánchez was both a taxi driver and a reporter and Roberto Toledo may well have been both an assistant to a lawyer and a collaborator for a news website.
Inconvenience
It’s easy to see why authorities in Mexico are so quick to discard journalism as the reason why journalists are attacked and killed. Deadly violence in Mexico is now so widespread, that ‘just another murder’ is relatively easy to ignore. An attack on a journalist because of their journalism, however, is not. Acknowledging that press freedom is at risk damages the prestige and reputation of a democracy. It is inconvenient.
It is also detrimental to the search for justice and for the truth. If a presidential spokesperson refuses to acknowledge that a murdered media colleaborator was even a media collaborator at all, it diminishes the amount of pressure on authorities to properly investigate. It perpetuates impunity.