Drug Culture" 'In Mexico, reporters are hunted like rabbits'

At the end of January  the Royal Courts of Justice to heard Jonathan Heawood, of English PEN, speak to the Leveson inquiry about the importance of a free press.

In Mexico free expression is all but buried.  Mexico has the dubious distinction of being tied for first place with Pakistan as the world's deadliest country for journalists.

Since 2000, 67 Mexican journalists have been killed – a number that President Calderón's war on drugs has only helped to increase. In 90% of these cases, no one has been prosecuted, never mind convicted. The PEN International delegation in collaboration with Mexican PEN, aimed to draw worldwide attention to the culture of impunity that silences not only the people who speak out, but the word itself.

The trip turned out to be an eye-opener, revealing the way in which competing drug cartels, inept or corrupt government, the police and terrified media join together in the suppression of free expression.

We met politicians and prosecutors, writers and journalists, ambassadors and NGOs, our visit culminating in a public event, "PEN Protesta", where dozens of Mexican writers spoke;  one paraphrasing Mandelstam, "if you kill poets it means you don't respect poetry but if you kill journalists you don't respect society.".

Mexico, described it as "a magical country full of assassinated people and no apparent assassins". 


One of Mexico's pre-eminent writers, Elena Poniatowska said, "reporters are hunted like rabbits."
...when it comes to the practice of journalism, and to the prosecution of the murderers of journalists, Mexico is caught in a series of interlocking catch-22s. The government blames the deaths on organised crime. 

But, according to the London-based free expression group Article 19, up to 70% of aggressions against the media are government-inspired. Most of these can be laid at the door of local and regional government, about which the national government says it can do little. 

Added to this, an inept or corrupted police force joins with a similarly corrupted media to portray the murders as crimes of passion, which means they are never properly investigated.
The big media corporations often lead the charge in denigrating murdered journalists, even accusing them of being linked to the same cartels they were trying to denounce. 

This obliteration of a free press is not surprising: when a cartel targets a town for take-over it first compromises the mayor with threats or money and then it takes care of the police. 

Having taken control, it cannot let the press talk about the extent of its corruption and so has to move in on this, the third leg of the stool.








by Gillian Slovo
 president of English PEN.


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http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/03/author-author-gillian-slovo

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