Mexican journalist Lourdes Maldonado dedicated her last program to a fellow journalist one day after he was gunned down outside his home, and then she described her own vulnerability covering the violent border city of Tijuana. She blasted Mexico’s corruption and accused a state official of drug ties before telling her viewers she had been under state government protection for eight months. “They take good care of you,” she said on her internet radio and television show called “Brebaje” or “Potion.” “But no one can avoid—not even under police supervision—getting killed outside your house in a cowardly manner.”
Her words eerily predicted her fate. Five days later, Maldonado was shot outside her home at 7 p.m. in the evening. She was the third journalist this year to be killed in Mexico. Their deaths over the span of a month is an unusually high toll in such a short period even in Mexico and drew the largest protest yet over the killings with thousands demonstrating nationwide on Tuesday. The murders have left journalists working in the most dangerous place for their trade in the Western Hemisphere — feeling angry and hopeless. See also: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2020/08/24/killing-of-journalists-in-mexico-juan-carlos-morrugares-the-latest-victim/
On Friday, a day after Maldonado’s funeral, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador returned to criticizing the press. He said that his government guarantees free speech but “very few journalists, women and men, are fulfilling their noble duty to inform. Most are looking to see how we fail.”
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, since the current administration began on Dec. 1, 2018, at least 32 journalists have been killed and 15 disappeared, despite a government program to protect them. See: https://humanrightsdefenders.blog/2022/01/19/international-press-institute-in-2021-45-journalists-died-doing-their-work/
“[T]he discrediting by the president is seen by others as permission to attack,” media advocate Leopoldo Maldonado (no relation to Lourdes Maldonado) says. Leopoldo Maldonado’s anger is shared by many in Mexico, as frustration and grief over their ever-growing number of dead peers pushes journalists to call for change. And despite promises by politicians like A.M.L.O., the government can do much more than conduct a simple investigation, because the inaction of the Mexican government is at the heart of the issue. Journalist violence isn’t solely the result of powerful cartels. Rather, journalist violence in Mexico is symptom of poor government policy, which creates dangerous social conditions, fails to hold perpetrators of violence accountable or build systems that protect journalists, and both directly and indirectly creates policies that hinder journalists.
On top of this on 28 January 2022 Mexican anti-femicide activist Ana Luisa Garduno Juarez was found dead by local authorities of southern Morelos state of Mexico in the early hours of Friday. Police reports said that a call was placed over gunfire inside a bar in Morelos’ Temixco city, on Thursday night. By the time authorities arrived, Garduno was found dead suffering gunshot wounds on her body.
https://www.yenisafak.com/en/world/anti-femicide-activist-murdered-in-mexico-3588570
This post was originally published on Hans Thoolen on Human Rights Defenders and their awards.
