Tuesday, December 27, 2022

The deadliest year for Mexican journalists

December 27, 2022

MEXICO CITY (AP) – The deadliest year in at least three decades for Mexican journalists and media workers is nearing a close, with 15 slayings – a perilous situation underlined by a brazen near-miss attack this week on one of the country’s most prominent journalists.

Two gunmen astride a motorcycle shot up radio and television journalist Ciro Gómez Leyva’s armored vehicle 200 yards from his home on Thursday night.

The journalist described the attack and posted photos of his vehicle to social media.

Solidarity has grown among Mexico’s press corps amid the carnage, and its members are making increasing noise after each killing.

They also have pushed back against a longtime government narrative that the victims weren’t real journalists or were corrupt.

Still, the killings – 15 counted by The Associated Press – have continued to rise.

This year, many of the dead were small town reporters running their own outlets on a shoestring. Others were freelancers, including for national publications, in big cities like Tijuana.

A vehicle without license plates followed him and then ran his motorcycle off the road, injuring the journalist, the press advocacy group Article 19 said.

That incident drew little notice. But it was national news that shots were fired at Gómez Leyva, who is one of Mexico’s best known journalists. He is a regular critic of the government and a frequent target of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s tirades against press criticism.

Nevertheless, López Obrador on Friday condemned the attempt against Gómez Leyva. While acknowledging they had their differences, the president said, “It is completely reprehensible for anyone to be attacked.”

Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said that this year the only nation to see more journalists killed is Ukraine, which is fighting the Russian invasion.

“We started gathering data on homicides of journalists in 1992, and it’s been both the highest number of journalist killings in a single year, and we can also say that so far it looks to be the deadliest sexenio (Mexico’s six-year presidential term), which means the deadliest period of a single Mexican president if the trend as things stand right now continues,” Hootsen said.

“Andrés Manuel López Obrador, both during the campaign and as president, has successfully politicised journalism in Mexico more than it has ever been in recent memory,” Hootsen said.

Katherine Corcoran, author of In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-up and the True Cost of Silencing the Press, said a big reason that journalist killings have remained stubbornly high in Mexico is that government officials are behind many of them.

“It’s some kind of government corruption that’s being threatened or some kind of government empire that’s being threatened when they go after these journalists,” said Corcoran, a former Associated Press bureau chief in Mexico.

The other factor is that Mexico’s press has become more independent and aggressive, she said. “The reporters really are hitting a nerve and that’s what’s getting them killed.”

Corcoran’s book focused on the 2012 killing one such journalist, Regina Martínez from the national news magazine Proceso. She said Martínez’s murder in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz overturned the government narrative that had long painted journalists who were killed as victims of their own corruption. Martínez was well-known, respected, ethical and believed to be beyond reproach.

Since Martínez was slain in April 2012, at least 86 other journalists and media workers have been killed in Mexico, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ data.

While there is more solidarity among Mexico’s journalists, they still receive little support from the Mexican public.

When a journalist is killed, dozens of colleagues gather to protest, but there is generally not an outpouring of anger from society in general.

Corcoran said that stems from a long period when much of Mexico’s press was part of the government machine and took significant amounts of money in exchange for positive coverage. “That idea of paying the press is going to haunt the press in Mexico forever, because it did exist and intermittently came back,” she said.

López Obrador frequently hammers that point during his daily news conferences. His administration cut much of those government payments and he says that is the reason he receives critical coverage.

Much like former US President Donald Trump did, López Obrador dismisses any critical press coverage as coming from corrupt reporters he calls his adversaries.

Last February, after five journalists had already been killed, the president said journalists “lie like they breathe”.

Still, Hootsen said there is not any evidence that federal officials in the current administration are behind violence targetting journalists.

However, he said, “it is very disappointing to see that even though the government is not actively persecuting journalists, it has done very little to prevent the persecution of journalists by other actors, either state or non-state”.

In the absence of that protection, Mexican journalists have become much better prepared for situations of violence by creating formal and informal networks of support and rapid response, as well as strengthening ties to civil society organisations, he said.

But when there are attacks on journalists they seldom lead to arrests and even more rarely to convictions.

“In terms of impunity, we are still seeing just about the same numbers that we’ve always seen, which means that more than 95 per cent of all the murders of journalists linger in impunity,” Hootsen said.

Algerian authorities arrest Ihsane El-Kadi, director of last free media outlet in Algeria

Basma El Atti
Rabat
26 December, 2022

For the past three years, Algerian journalist El-Kadi has faced relentless judicial harassment.


There has not yet been any official announcement on why El-Kadi was arrested [Getty]

Algerian authorities arrested renowned journalist Ihsane El-Kadi on Friday night at his home in Zemmouri, amid a continued crackdown on freedom of speech.

El-Kadi runs the independent station Radio M, which is widely considered the last space for free debate in Algeria.

The journalist's daughter, Tin Hinan El-Kadi, said on social media that a General Directorate of Internal Security (French acronym DGSI) brigade composed of six men in two vehicles had ordered him at half past midnight to follow them to a police station in Ben Aknoun, a suburb of Algiers.

Radio M's website reported that El-Kadi had received a call two hours ahead of his arrest asking him to report immediately to the station, but the journalist said that he was too far from the capital.

No official reason has been given for his arrest, however some observers have speculated that it may be related to a recent post on Twitter.

In his latest tweet, El-Kadi challenged President Abdelmadjid Tebboune's assertion about the recovery of $20 billion from oligarchs linked to late president Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

“The public treasury has recovered 20 billion dollars from the oligarchs of Issaba, said President Tebboune without batting an eyelid!!!! How dare you say something so mathematically crude to reputedly the best educated citizens in Africa?” he tweeted on Friday.

For the past three years, El-Kadi has faced relentless judicial harassment.

In June 2021, he was sentenced to six months in prison without a warrant for an opinion piece on the role of Islamists in the Hirak movement.


MENA Basma El Atti

However, El-Kadi continued to express himself freely while much of the rest of the country's media was being reined in. Many Algerian journalists were forced to self-censor their writing for their safety.

"In recent years we have been forced into self-censorship. Journalists have been imprisoned for reporting. The pressures on media managers pushed us to be careful about what we write," Ali Boukhlef, an Algerian journalist told The New Arab.

In a press release, the board of directors of Interface Média, the agency that brings together Radio M and the Maghreb Emergent news website, said on 23 December that the authorities aim "today more and more clearly to take from us, by various means, our established status as an electronic press publisher".

"Our media platform has been undergoing for three years has no other basis than preventing the free exercise of the profession to inform," read the press release.


In-depth   Basma El Atti

Journalists cornered

Three years after the pro-reform Hirak protests, Algeria remains a dangerous place to be a journalist.

Algeria is ranked 134th out of 180 countries on Reporters Without Borders' (RSF) 2022 World Press Freedom Index.

Algerian authorities are holding at least 280 activists and dozens of journalists in detention, mostly for defamation of politicians or because of posts on social networks.

After toppling the two-decade-long regime of Bouteflika in 2019, Algerians’ path to democracy was soon sabotaged by President Tebboune's fledgling regime.

In addition to a crackdown on freedom of speech, financial hardships over the last twenty years have pushed many titles, including Liberté, Le Matin, La Tribune and the weekly La Nation, to close due to a drop in advertising revenue and sales.

El-Watan, the most widely printed Francophone newspaper in Algeria, recently released a statement predicting that its closure is only "a question of time" due to rising political pressure and economic difficulties.

"The majority of the media [in Algeria] can no longer provide a decent living for journalists," lamented Boukhlef.

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