The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is an independent, non-profit organization that promotes press freedom and journalists’ rights globally. Founded in 1981, its headquarters are in New York City and for 10 years it has produced the Global Impunity Index that shows the countries where journalists are murdered and perpetrators go free. To determine a country’s position, CPJ calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country’s population.
CPJ released its 2021 Index yesterday, and it lists 12 countries listed below in descending order with the number of unsolved murders as a percentage of their population: Somalia 25; Syria 21; Iraq 18; South Sudan 5; Afghanistan 17; Mexico 27; Philippines 13; Brazil 14; Pakistan 12; Russia 6; Bangladesh 6; India 20.
Although Mexico appears in the sixth position in the Index, the reality is that for the number of homicides of unsolved journalists it is in first place, above many countries where there is political instability and even civil war, such as Somalia, Syria, Iraq, South Sudan and Afghanistan.
According to CPJ, since 1992 60 journalists have been murdered in our country, while 15 have disappeared never to be seen again. Other sources claim that more than 300 have been killed since 1980.
The most recent case is that of a reporter for the conservative site Breitbart News, the Mexican-American Gerardo Antonio Moreno Aranda, originally from Monterrey, whose body was found on October 4 floating in the waters off the coast of Chiapas. Authorities first said he had drowned, but later the State Attorney General’s Office said it was applying homicide protocols to determine whether or not his death was caused by a third party. CPJ repeatedly sought out the Chiapas prosecutor, Olaf Gómez Hernández, for comment on the case, but he did not respond to the requests.
Moreno, an investigative reporter specializing in organized crime and corruption, traveled to Chiapas to investigate the militia called Los Machetes, whose bosses claim that the group was created to combat organized crime in the municipality of Pantelhó. But Moreno was investigating possible links between the militia and the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful and bloodthirsty criminal organization. He was also researching Central American migration in the area.
Days before Moreno’s death, on September 28, in Cuernavaca (Morelos), some still unidentified people shot to death the journalist Manuel González Reyes of PM de Morelos and nothing allows us to suppose that this case will be solved and that the murderers answer for their crime.
The situation for journalists in Mexico is not easy and more if one takes into account that every Wednesday, from the Treasury Room of the National Palace, an improvised official, obeying the orders of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, dedicates minutes to criticize, with good reason. or not, and sometimes to revile journalists who point out what they see as failures of the Q4 government.
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Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx