The Guadalajara Reporter

New law to protect journalists welcomed as its effectiveness is questioned by media executives, reporters, free press advocates

After a haystack full of unfulfilled political promises, Mexico’s Senate March 13 finally approved a constitutional amendment making attacks on journalists a federal crime. This came after years of public pressure, both here and abroad, especially from news gatherers and their supporters in this country, where 51 journalists were killed from 2000 to 2011, according to the latest figures from the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists. That number is disputed by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, and numerous journalists. The Human Rights Commission presently places the number at 74, since President Felipe Calderon launched his “war on drugs” in December 2006. That move now is widely considered precipitant by international law enforcement experts, by Mexican journalists, even by members of his own administration. Such critics generally agree that he should have taken a year to shake-out and coordinate the nation’s law enforcement agencies, the judiciary and the military, preparing them to launch an unprecedented nationwide anti-crime campaign. “He bit off way more than he could chew,” as one U.S. drug cartel analyst has said. Clearly journalists in Mexico, and elsewhere, agree with that.

One of the reasons for different KIA/MIA numbers by different organizations is that so many journalists have simply disappeared. Some have quit and moved with their families to different, safer places in Mexico. Some have (legally) moved to the United States, some have “disappeared” — kidnapped and never heard of again. This often happened under the 71-year rule of the politically resurgent Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), particularly in the 1960s and ‘70s.

And while this new amendment, which still has to be approved by at least 17 of Mexico’s 31 states, is being widely applauded, there are more than a few dissenters. In 2006, a Special Prosecutor’s Officer was created to investigate crimes against the freedom of expression classified as federal offenses. That office never solved a single murder involving a journalist. With the openness with which drug cartelistas have killed journalists, that seems a near impossible achievement.

Enthusiastic supporters of the new amendment maintain that by making the murder of a journalist a federal crime, the government is 1) taking such offenses out of the hands of state and local law enforcement personnel, including judges, who often are corrupt or inefficient, or both, and 2) upping the punishment.

Yet, as Eugenio Herrera, general counsel for Grupo Reforma, Mexico’s largest newspaper publisher, notes: “... (W)e have higher prison punishments for kidnapping, for drug trafficking and that doesn’t seem to deter criminals from committing those crimes.” And a large assortment of innately curious and probing journalists point out that a useful result depends on several contingencies that seem to unrelentingly maim Mexico’s justice system. Two of the most obvious: Will the perpetrator of the crime ever be arrested, and 2) will the inefficient and corruption-riddled judiciary system ever find him guilty? Such journalists point out that 80 percent — four out of five — of homicides in Mexico go unpunished.

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