Abstract
Journalists in Mexico are facing threats from a corrupt government and violent cartels, and they can’t always trust fellow reporters either, writes
A demonstrator holds a placard during a recent protest against a fuel price hike in Mexico City. Police beat and threatened journalists who covered it, according to reports
CREDIT: Carlos Jasso/Reuters
Escorcia had just received a series of threats for writing an article about recent unrest in the country. The next day the threats against him intensified. Feeling trapped and unprotected, he began making plans to flee the country.
Many people are concerned about the state of freedom of expression in Mexico. A stagnant economy, a currency in freefall, a bloody drug war with no end in sight, a deeply unpopular president at home and the belligerent Donald Trump administration freshly installed in the USA across the border, these forces are all creating a squeeze in 2017.
One of the biggest tensions is Mexico’s own president. Enrique Peña Nieto’s four years in office have brought sluggish economic growth. There has also been resurgent violence and a string of corruption scandals. In January this year his approval ratings plummeted to 12%.
But when journalists have tried to report on the president and his policies they have come under fire. For example, 2017 began with intense protests after Peña Nieto announced a 20% hike in petrol prices. Days of demonstrations, blockades, looting and confrontations with police left at least six people dead and more than 1,500 arrested. The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that police beat, threatened or briefly detained at least 19 reporters, who were covering the unrest in the northern states of Coahuila and Baja California.
News was not just suppressed, it was fabricated. Mass hysteria enveloped Mexico City as legions of Twitter bots incited violence and spread false reports of further looting, causing the temporary closure of 20,000 small businesses.
“I’ve never seen Mexico City like this,” Escorcia said over the phone from his home in the capital. “There are more police than normal. There are helicopters flying above us every hour and you can hear sirens constantly. Even though there hasn’t been any looting in this part of the city, people think it’s happening everywhere.”
Escorcia, who has investigated the use of bots in Mexico over the past seven years, believes the fake Twitter accounts were deployed to generate fear and to discredit and distract from legitimate protests against the petrol hike and government corruption. He said he’d identified at least 485 accounts that repeatedly incited people to “ransack a Walmart”.
“First they call on people to ransack shops, then they demand that the looters be punished and call for the army to be deployed,” Escorcia explained. “This is a very delicate issue because it could lead to calls to censor the internet or arrest activists,” he added, noting that the current administration has already had one thwarted attempt at establishing legislative powers to block internet access during “events critical to public or national security”.
Days after the “ransack a Walmart” hashtag went viral, Benito Rodríguez, a hacker based in Spain, told Mexico’s El Financiero newspaper that he had been paid to make it a trending topic. Rodríguez said he sometimes works for the Mexican government and admitted that it “might” have been a party that paid him to incite looting.
The Peña Nieto administration has long been suspected of using bots for political purposes. In an interview with Bloomberg last year, the Colombian hacker Andrés Sepúlveda said that he’d been hired to influence the outcome of nine presidential elections across Latin America since 2005. These included Mexico’s 2012 election, when he claimed Peña Nieto’s team paid him to hack into the communications of their candidate’s two closest rivals and lead an army of 30,000 Twitter bots to manipulate trending topics and attack the other contenders. The president’s office issued a statement denying any relationship with Sepúlveda.
Mexico’s journalists are also under threat from violent cartels. While researching his latest book Narcoperiodismo (Narco-journalism), the founder of Ríodoce newspaper, Javier Valdez, was struck by how common it now is for newsrooms at local papers to be infiltrated by cartel spies and informants. “Serious journalism with ethics is very important in times of conflict, but unfortunately there are journalists who are involved with narcos,” he told Index. “This has made our work much more complicated and now we have to protect ourselves from politicians, narcos and even other journalists.”
Valdez knows full well the dangers of upsetting the powers that be. Ríodoce is based in Sinaloa, a sweltering state where the economy revolves around the drug trade. “In 2009 someone threw a grenade into the Ríodoce office, although it only caused material damages,” he said. “I’ve had phone calls telling me to stop investigating certain murders or drug bosses. I’ve had to suppress important information because they could have my family killed if I mention it. Sources of mine have been killed or disappeared… The government couldn’t care less. They do nothing to protect you. There have been many cases and this keeps happening.”
Despite the common problems they face, Valdez laments that there is little sense of solidarity among Mexican journalists or support from wider society. Moreover, as Mexico gears up for next year’s presidential elections and continues to struggle with economic problems, he fears the pressures on journalists will only intensify, with grave consequences for the nation.
“The risks for society and democracy are extremely grave. Journalism can have a big impact on democracy and social consciousness, but when we’re working under so many threats our work is never as complete as it should be,” Valdez warned.
Without drastic change, Mexico and its journalists will face an even bleaker future, he added: “I don’t see a society that stands by its journalists or protects them. At Ríodoce we don’t have any support from business owners to finance projects. If we went bankrupt and shut down nobody would do anything [to help]. We have no allies. We need more publicity, subscriptions and moral support but we’re on our own. We’re not going to survive much longer in these circumstances.”
Faced with a similarly tough situation, Escorcia shares this sense of urgency. Yet he remains defiant, tweeting after the latest threats against him: “This is our country, our home, our future and only by building networks can we save it. Telling the truth, uniting people, creating new media outlets, supporting existing ones, making public what they want to censor. This is how we can really help.”
