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2022 marked as deadliest year on record for Mexican journalists

Data on the killing of journalists since 1992 shows Mexico has seen "the highest number of journalist killings in a single year," says the non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists.

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This year, many of the dead were small-town reporters running their own outlets on a shoestring. Others were freelancers, including for national publications, in big cities like Tijuana.

2022 has been the deadliest year in at least three decades for Mexican journalists and media workers, with 15 slayings — a perilous situation underlined by a near-miss attack this week on one of the country’s most prominent journalists.

Two gunmen astride a motorcycle shot up radio and television journalist Ciro Gomez Leyva’s armoured vehicle 200 yards from his home on Thursday night.

Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said that this year the only country to see more journalists killed is Ukraine.

“We started gathering data on homicides of journalists in 1992," Hootsen said, adding that in 2022 Mexico has seen "the highest number of journalist killings in a single year."

He added that "so far it looks to be the deadliest ‘sexenio' (Mexico's six-year presidential term), which means the deadliest period of a single Mexican president if the trend as things stand right now continues.”

While acknowledging they had their differences, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday condemned the attempt against Gomez Leyva, saying, “It is completely reprehensible for anyone to be attacked.”

'Hitting a nerve'

“Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, both during the campaign and as president, has successfully politicized journalism in Mexico more than it has ever been in recent memory,” Hootsen said.

One of Mexico’s best-known journalists, Leyva, is a regular critic of the government.

Author Katherine Corcoran, a former Associated Press bureau chief in Mexico, said a big reason that journalist killings have remained stubbornly high in Mexico is that government officials are behind many of them.

The other factor is that Mexico’s press has become more independent and aggressive, she said. “The reporters really are hitting a nerve, and that’s what’s getting them killed.”

While there is more solidarity among Mexico’s journalists, they still receive little support from the Mexican public. According to Corcoran, that stems from a long period when much of Mexico’s press was part of the government machine and took significant amounts of money in exchange for positive coverage.

Lopez Obrador frequently hammers that point during his daily news conferences. His administration cut much of those government payments, and the president dismisses any critical press coverage as coming from corrupt reporters he calls his adversaries.

Still, Hootsen said there is no evidence that federal officials in the current administration are behind violence targeting journalists.

However, he said, “it is very disappointing to see that even though the government is not actively persecuting journalists, it has done very little to prevent the persecution of journalists by other actors, either state or non-state.”

“In terms of impunity, we are still seeing just about the same numbers that we’ve always seen, which means that more than 95 percent of all the murders of journalists linger in impunity,” Hootsen said.

SOURCE: AP