Another journalist was killed this weekend in the southern Mexican state of Veracruz. The body of Regina Martinez, a reporter for the political weekly magazine Proceso was found in the bathroom of her home in the city of Xalapa with signs of heavy blows and strangulation.
Martinez is the fifth journalist in Veracruz to be slain in the past 18 months, an ongoing battle between the Zetas drug cartel and members of the Chapo Guzman Sinaloa Cartel has contributed to a spiral of violence and corruption. Other journalists killed in the last year include Noel Lopez Olguin de Noticias de Acayucan, Miguel Angel Lopez, Misael Lopez Solana and Yolanda Ordaz of the newspaper Notiver. No one has been convicted or arrested in these cases.
Martinez was a Procesco reporter for more than a decade and she frequently wrote about drug trafficking.
The last story she filed for the magazine was about the arrest of nine police officers in the municipality of Tres Valle for alleged ties to organised crime. Martinez is the first Proceso reporter to be killed since the magazine was founded 36 years ago. People took to social networking sites to express their outrage over the murder and demand answers.
The latest murder will undoubtedly trigger a chilling effect, which will mean even less reporting on drug related violence. In parts of Mexico where organised crime has pushed journalists into silence, reporters and citizens have used social media networks to keep the public informed about violence and corruption.
This won’t happen in Veracruz, the state sent Twitter users Gilberto Martínez Vera and María de Jesús Bravo Pagola to prison on terrorism charges after they tweeted warnings about local drug gang violence. In a recent interview, the now released Martinez Vera described how his 21 days in prison last August destroyed his life. The mathematics professor now only tweets about religion out of fear of facing trouble once more. Both Martínez Vera and Bravo Pagola faced 30 years in prison if convicted on terrorism charges, they were released after an international outcry.
In Mexico, a video showing child actors acting as corrupt politicians, drug traffickers and police on the take has gone viral. Uploaded on You Tube on 9 April, the film clip had reached more than 1 million viewers by the weekend of 15 April. But on 16 April, the video was removed from the video sharing site
Produced by a business group, the film had been criticised by politicians, who claimed it violated the human rights of minors. Yes, there was something unsettling in seeing an 8- or 12-year-old child waving a gun or pickpocketing another child dressed as a businessman. But the film hit a sore spot, as it allowed adults to see how far certain problems have grown in Mexico. The video was well-produced and it was simple in its message. It showed the problem and then asked politicians to solve it.
It is hard not to imagine that politicians were a bit jealous: released in the middle of a national electoral period, the movie gained almost 200,000 followers per day the week it was up on You Tube. The sad part is that this is only the first movie that captured the attention of the Mexican voter. While Mexico is an advanced democracy, albeit today engulfed in drug trafficking related violence, its political campaigns go back to another century. The four presidential candidates and the myriad candidates for Congress are presented in wooden poses and clichéd manners in television, billboards and even on social media.
Only one politician, Miguel Mancera — said to be the top contender for the mayoral race in Mexico City — publicly applauded the video. One columnist claimed that the video is a trap because it was superficial in its demands, and it did not address issues that keep Mexican society unequal.
Because of the success of the first video, the producers created a second video where the child actors, dressed for their roles, are interviewed on camera about problems in Mexico and give their point of view as to what type of city they would like in the future. One of the child actors, Jose Stallin Maya Gonzalez, who plays a corrupt judicial policeman who steals from robbers in the first video, says: “Well, in the Mexico of the Future, the police would take care of us.”
A radio broadcaster has been killed in Sabá, northern Honduras, making him the 18th journalist to be killed in the country since 2010. Fausto Elio Hernández, host of The Voice of the News programme broadcast on local station Radio Alegre, was hacked to death by a machete-wielding attacker on 10 March.
While police have reportedly said the killing is not related to Hernández’s work as a journalist, Honduras has the second-highest murder rate for journalists in Latin America, after Mexico.
The author and publisher of a bestselling book on Mexican drug trafficking were sued in Mexico City this week for defamation. Anabel Hernandez, and the publisher Random House Mondadori were sued following remarks contained in Los Señores del Narco, The Lords of Drug Trafficking, a book that takes to task Mexican politicians and businessmen and traces a system of corruption and collusion back to the 1970s.
Former Attorney General Jorge Carpizo said the book damaged his reputation by insinuating he kept $400 thousand dollars of the reward money earmarked for the 1993 capture of drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera. Carpizo believes Hernandez attacked him without valid sources, and without presenting any official evidence of her charges. “Having access to various public documents and books, the journalist made a number of affirmations that lack truth and context”, said the lawsuit, which was filed on the heels of an announcement by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), that Anabel Hernandez had won their Golden Pen for Freedom award for 2012.
Hernandez, a reporter for online magazine Reporte Indigo, said in an interview that Carpizo’s charges were baseless. “I adhere to the principles of the Constitution and Mexico’s Press Law,” she said, arguing that the lawsuit from Carpizo’s is in retaliation for details included in the book which mentioned the names of powerful Mexicans. “In a book of 600 pages, I mention Carpizo three times,” she explained. Carpizo was one of five attorney generals who served under former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
The book was published in Spanish in December 2010 and has remained on the bestseller list in Mexico, having also sold a record number of copies in the United States. The book makes several assertions that have caused Hernandez trouble. In it she claims that the governments of Vicente Fox, who served in office from 2000 to 2006, and Felipe Calderon, who will leave office in December this year, made a pact to protect the Sinaloa Cartel, led by El Chapo Guzman, the same kingpin who was captured by Carpizo in 1993. Guzman escaped from a high security prison in 2001, a few months after Fox took office. According to the book, Calderon’s war on drugs is only against enemies of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Hernandez has lived with fulltime bodyguards since publishing the book. “I knew I was touching a lot of important and powerful people, so I accept my fate,” she said. According to the journalist, the lawsuit against her is just one of several that have been lodged against Mexican journalists to silence them. “This is the latest technique to attack freedom of the press,” she insisted. “They keep us going from tribunal to tribunal, and stop us from doing our work.” Last year Hernandez publicly accused Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna, who is accused of protecting drug traffickers in the book, of planning to assassinate her.
Hernandez took 5 years to write the book. She will receive the WAN´s Golden Pen of Freedom award in September 2012 in Ukraine. She is the first Latin American reporter to receive the award since 1990, when the late Luis Gabriel Cano won the award. Cano was brother of Guillermo Cano, who was killed by Colombin drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
