If Only It Was Like That Here

Illustration by Mara Bueno

If you have killed a journalist in Mexico since 1992 you can probably relax about being caught. The impunity rate for murders of members of the press over there is a reassuring 92 per cent. Last year, men in a four-by-four pulled up outside Tabasco Hoy, a leading newspaper, and delivered the severed head of a local councillor in a cooler-box. Since then, grenade attacks on media offices have caused papers to close down. In 2007, Mexico was ranked second most dangerous country for the media, pipped to the post by Iraq. We caught up with Omar Rabago Vital who is in charge of investigations at CENCOS, an organisation that is trying to protect press freedom in Mexico. Fun times, kind of. Vice: Hello Omar. I read about the Tabasco Hoy incident with the severed head. That’s worrying. Omar Rabago Vital: The really strange thing in that case was that the police never started an investigation into the incident, and the people from Tabasco Hoy never asked for one. Wait, someone hand-delivered a severed head to the office and no one looked into it? No. How big is the problem of press intimidation in Mexico? During 2007 we registered 64 cases of journalists or mass media employees who had suffered intimidation. The majority of these events involved physical attacks. Three journalists were murdered last year. None of the investigations into these three crimes have shown results. Most attacks on journalists and mass media don’t become public. What do these journalists do to get themselves killed? The journalist’s job is to find the stories that matter, but in their path they find obstacles. Some of them denounce political corruption. In the search for the news they are touching dangerous issues, and these are connected to dangerous people. Who is responsible for the intimidation that journalists are exposed to? In our study of attacks upon journalists in Mexico, the results show that 48 per cent of the attacks were the responsibility of government officials or their employees, 14 per cent from organised crime syndicates and the remainder are unknown. I take it the police aren’t very helpful in this area then? Not hugely. Sometimes it is the police who are responsible for the attacks. Almost none of the legal proceedings started by victims of intimidation who work in the media end up in court. Often the investigations aren’t finished due to a “lack of evidence”. In very rare cases, one person may be publicly punished for the crime but the verdict will not implicate whole groups or organisations. Has any progress been made? There have been some advances made by the Mexican government. In 2006, they created the Special Office of the Public Prosecutor to monitor crimes committed against journalists, but these organisations don’t have enough legal tools to take care of all the crimes. So ultimately the response of the Mexican government is inadequate. Aren’t you afraid to speak out about this? Do you take precautions to protect yourself? We are not afraid, but we take precautions because, as I said before, there are some powerful groups behind the attacks on journalists. We take care verifying the information, and taking personal security measures. When we are outside Mexico City we constantly report our locations in case we go missing. We are more afraid for the journalists as they are the ones at real risk. We know that our telephone lines are tapped almost all the time – we we have aroused the unwelcome interest of many powerful people – but I will not make a guess at who is monitoring us. Sometimes we see strangers hanging around our office, and on a few occasions there have been cars without license plates following us around. What is the worst case of press intimidation you have come across? There are several types of intimidation, such as intimidation to send a message to the other journalists, physical or verbal harassment to spread fear. But the worst cases are the ones that result in the death of a journalist.