Mexico, the most dangerous country for a journalist in the world: “This is a state that attacks”

Mexican journalist Javier Valdes was killed by 12 bullets after leaving a weekly newsroom. Rhodes, In Culiacan, Sinaloa. It was on May 15, 2017, in broad daylight, that three people were shot from a car. Only one of the 13 shots missed the target. A few weeks earlier, Valdes had published an interview with Dámaso “El Licenciado” Lopez Serrano, one of the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s accomplice, both arrested in the United States for drug addiction.

Journalist Grizelda Triana, Valdés’s wife, was forced to leave her home in Sinalo the same year and was forced to join a human rights watchdog and journalist body under the Ministry of the Interior to protect her life. “My family and I are people who are being displaced because there are no conditions to return to Sinaloa,” he said. elDiario.es Triana.

But Valdes’s case is no exception. Mexico is the most dangerous country for journalists in the world The latest rating on press freedom, Published by Reporters Without Borders. Eleven journalists have been killed this year, nine of them because of their direct involvement in journalism. According to the Mexican organization, at least 140 journalists have been killed and 30 disappeared since 2006. Civil proposal.

“Journalists in Mexico are doing journalism between risk and chaos,” said Sarah Mendiola, the organization’s executive director, who is campaigning for Freedom of Expression Day in Mexico on Tuesday. And what to do To make visible the risky task of journalism in Mexico.

“The main aggressors of journalists in Mexico are the public authorities, which generates very depraved dynamics from the state itself. The state is obliged to protect life, but the state itself attacks journalists,” Mendiola condemned.

For human rights defenders and relatives of victims in Mexico, there is a network of complicity between politics and drug trafficking. In many cases, the crime is ordered by the local public authority and carried out by the participants in the organized crime. “Today we have a serious problem in the country of drug policy, that is, the connection between political actors and organized crime actors,” said Mendiola.

Luis Enrique Ramirez, a well-known newspaper reviewer Debates From Culiacan, is one of the last journalists to be killed for his activities. With a record of over 40 years in media such as La Jornada, Millennium and El Financiero, Ramirez’s body was found wrapped in plastic on May 4 on Culiacანისn Road.

But cases of violence are added to impunity. “In the case of missing journalists, the impunity rate is 100%,” Mendiola said. “We have a criminal justice system where investigative files are opened for murder, disappearances, threats, torture, but the investigation is not moving forward, it is not going. At best only they can be identified. “Those who carry out the aggression, but not those who order it.”

“We are women, companions of victims, wives who remain at the forefront of seeking justice after murder or disappearance. What good is a web site if it simply “blends in” with everything else out there? To find the answers? “Says Triana. In Valdes’ case, the judiciary has gone ahead with arresting the authors of the material, but not the intellectual.” “Then it is semi-justice, it is not justice if there is no full justice.”

Mexico ranks 180th out of 179th in terms of the safety of journalists, with Costa Rica continuing to make the exception of the continent that is safest in the practice of this profession, ranking eighth in danger.

At the federal policy level, the director of Civic Proposal is critical of the role of President Andrés Manuel L ლოpez Obrador, who came to the presidency under the banner of protecting human rights and freedoms, but “when he took office. “The flags have become invisible.”

“In his press conferences, on a platform that could clearly be a democratic exercise, Lopez Obrador called journalists enemies or friends of power. “And in a violent country, it’s extremely risky.”

Source: El Diario

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