For this post, I gathered information from our course’s textbook, the documentary titled “Silenced: The Killing of Journalists in Mexico: Fault Lines Documentary.”, and the article “López Obrador’s Last Chance to Protect Mexico’s Press.”. I found many stories about journalists who have been murdered in Mexico but I will be focusing on a particular case of a man named Moises Sanchez Cerezo. Sanchez had a passion for reporting about local government, security and corruption. He owned a newspaper named La Unión, for one of his stories, he interviewed an official in Medellín. In this interview, Sanchez called out Omar Cruz out for not being able to provide security to the civilians living in the area. Eventually, national medias came to Medellín to see what was going on in the state and they were asking questions like “why is state doing a bad job?”. The mayor was mad that he got exposed so he sent threats to Sanchez. Sanchez was kidnapped from his home and was found dead, he had been decapitated and dismembered. Killings of reporters, keep increasing in Mexico, averaging a total of 12 killings per year as stated in the textbook.

Moises Sanches a Mexican journalist

The protection of civil rights is complex, because reporters have the right to a free press which is a liberty right, but because of this, they are being targeted. They are between reporting the truth, and managing to stay alive which compromises their security rights. News reporters live in fear, they don’t know if they are going to leave their house and come back alive or be killed. Many reporters need the government to protect them, but even then the government doesn’t do the best job. In the documentary there was a woman who enrolled in the government protection program, but the program had an end date. It’s unfortunate, because sometimes the people in power are the ones that are using violence against reporters to protect themselves like we saw in this case with Sanchez. Currently, Omar Cruz has not been captured and the information from the documentary tells us “Nine out of ten of those murders are never solved,”. I really like this quote from our textbook: “when civil rights are strong, the powerful and the wealthy are bound by the law” however, most of the time in Latin America it is not the case.

In my research, I found a few reasons as to why security rights are not being protected, and some of those factors are the failure to end high-level corruption. Like I quoted earlier, when the powerful are bound by the law, civilians have more civil rights. However, office holders, which are the authorities, break laws because of a mutual benefit with another group of people, they might take bribes or fear drug cartels. In weak and corrupt democracies failure to protect civil rights is common. It is very difficult to hold the government accountable because they have impunity, this affects equality rights because there is clearly no equality before the law, officials are abusing their power.

There are definitely improvements that need to be made in Mexico that will protect civil rights. All kinds of civil rights are connected to one another, so if one of them is weak, it will cause the other ones to be weakened as well. In order to move forward, I think there has to be a change in the government. They need to be trustworthy and not abuse the power that they have been given. They also need to have the ability to protect civilians, and provide the right to life to them, having one kind of rights shouldn’t cause for another to be compromised. For example, the liberty to a free press shouldn’t compromise the right to life for reporter. It’s important to keep advocating for reporters, and to remind people of all of those who have been killed, people have brought it up to Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador but his perception of the situation hasn’t caused much change because he hasn’t done anything to help decrease violence against journalists who are doing their work. All of these victims need justice and Lopez Obrador is responsible for creating a change that will improve civil rights to his people.

 

sources:

Hootsen, Jan-Albert. “López Obrador’s Last Chance to Protect Mexico’s Press.” Just Security, 23 Mar. 2022, www.justsecurity.org/80794/lopez-obradors-last-chance-to-protect-mexicos-press/.

“Silenced: The Killing of Journalists in Mexico: Fault Lines Documentary.” YouTube, 9 Nov. 2022, youtu.be/0djgrGA8RDA?feature=shared.