The Guadalajara Reporter

New law aims to make journalism a safer occupation

The Mexican Senate this month passed a bill to bolster failing protections for human rights activists and journalists working in the country. The bill, a modification to Section 21 of Article 73 of the Mexican Constitution, had already passed Congress’s lower house. Now, 17 states need to ratify it to baptize it as law of the land.

More than 40 journalists have been killed or have disappeared in Mexico since the launch of the drug war in 2006, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based independent nonprofit organization. Other groups, such as Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), give a higher figure – around 70. These numbers have put Mexico up in CPJ’s top ten most dangerous countries worldwide to practice the profession.

The new law will move from state to federal jurisdiction all “crimes against reporters, journalists or other people or outlets that affect, limit or reduce the right to information or the freedom of expression or the press,” raising the stakes and reducing the possibility of corrupt local officials overseeing the investigation and prosecution process.

The CPJ keeps a worldwide Impunity Index, a rolling ten-year evaluation of crimes against the press that go unsolved. Mexico ranked eighth most dangerous place to practice journalism in the world last year, with 0.121 unsolved journalist murders per one million inhabitants.

Recent history does not paint a flattering picture for state-level Mexican governments in charge of prosecuting violence against journalists.

Sometimes arrests are made and no trial materializes, as in the case of Alejandro Zenon Fonseca Estrada, a radio host in Villahermosa, Tabasco who was killed while hanging anti-crime posters on the streets one morning in 2008.

Other times, police discover the name of the culprit when he can no longer stand trial. After the 2007 murder of Rodolfo Rincon Taracena, reporter for Tabasco Hoy, also in Villahermosa, several low-level gang members were said to confess to participating in his murder, but identified the actual killer as a man who subsequently died in a gunfight with the police.

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