A television journalist in Veracruz, a Gulf Coast state with an authoritarian tradition, and where nine journalists have been killed in the past two years, said state officials benefit when journalists flee, taking heat off them for corruption.
Quitze Fernandez, a columnist for the El Guardian newspaper in this capital of Coahuila state abutting Texas, picked up the phone in his newsroom one day.
“Either you come or we are coming for you,” he heard.
Within minutes, he was in an SUV surrounded by heavily armed gangsters. One held a knife to his throat. Another jabbed a gun barrel into his ribs. They said they didn’t like a headline in the newspaper.
They tossed a copy in his face. He glanced down and saw it wasn’t El Guardian. Thinking quickly, he convinced the gunmen that they had mistaken his newspaper for another. They let him go, deeply shaken but alive.
Mexico is easily the most dangerous place in the Western Hemisphere for reporters to ply their trade. Dozens of journalists have been killed or disappeared. Nearly every month, a newspaper or a radio or TV station is firebombed, attacked with explosives or raked with gunfire, targeted by the country’s rising criminal gangs who use violence to discourage reporting the gangsters don’t like.
And the violence has worked. In much of Mexico, local news outlets no longer report on organized crime or corruption. Analysts call these areas “zones of silence,” where the lights have gone out on the dark activities within.
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