IPI BLOG: In Mexico: Journalists’ Deaths Used to Send Messages to the Living
Messages left on the bodies of journalists warning others not to report are a perversion of the journalism profession and should be loudly and forcefully condemned by those who care for press freedom.
With three killed in almost as many weeks, it is hard not to feel a growing revulsion at the murders of innocent journalists in Mexico. Even as the head of a longstanding press freedom organization that has spent much of its sixty years analyzing and reacting to the murders of journalists, it is hard not to feel a visceral, angry reaction to their callous deaths.
Perhaps it is the cruel manner in which they were killed: Valentin Valdes Espinosa, kidnapped, tortured, shot and his body dumped; Jose Luis Romero, legs broken, bullet wounds to head and back, body found in a black plastic bag and Jorge Ochoa Martinez, shot in the face.
These are terrible crimes that have been rightly condemned by the international community, but there can be little hope that the Mexican police will ever solve the murders and bring the perpetrators to justice.
At present in Mexico, with 14 journalists murdered since the beginning of 2009, the killings are little more than statistics in the country’s ongoing battle against the country’s violent drug cartels; a battle that the police and authorities do not appear to be winning and that with each unpunished murder only strengthens the belief among the killers that they can continue to kill again and again with total impunity.
Although the torture and murder display a total absence of humanity, it is the messages left behind on the bodies of these journalists that are the most upsetting. In the case of Valdes Espinosa, the message of the murderers was addressed to “everyone” and said, “this will happen to anybody who does not understand.” Left near a highway, a similar message was left on the body of Ochoa Martinez.
These messages are a perversion of the journalists’ calling: journalists who spent their lives reporting and providing information to the public are abused in their deaths by being forced to communicate warnings to their fellow journalists. In effect, against the very principles by which they lived, they are used in death to censor and intimidate their surviving colleagues.
This is nothing more than a horrible inversion of the media’s work and there appears to be no end in sight to the drug cartels’ attempts to silence journalists who courageously continue to report on events in Mexico.
The message of the murderers that journalists can be silenced and intimidated should be rejected. The international community must not forget these murdered journalists and it must apply pressure on the Mexican government to ensure that the perpetrators are found. It’s time for those who believe in press freedom to send a forceful message back.