LatinaLista — Being a journalist can be a thankless job, especially when politicians take every opportunity to demonize the press, or in the case of Mexico make them targets of the worst kind of violence.
Mexico now ranks as one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. Since 2003, eleven journalists have been reported missing and since the year 2000, 67 journalists have been killed — and most of these murders remain unsolved.
The drug cartels are a big reason why Mexican journalists find themselves a part of the story of the violence sweeping the country. It has become almost routine for newspapers in those towns experiencing the bulk of cartel violence to receive death and bomb threats and even assaults on their employees and buildings.
The level of violence directed at some of the journalists has been so extreme that it’s driving journalists across the U.S.-Mexico border to ask for asylum for them and their families.
The reasoning behind the targeted violence is that the drug cartels want to control the media — with the government not doing enough to protect journalists, the journalists are caught in the middle of trying to sustain one of the basic tenets of a democracy — a free press.
Journalists are fed up with the intimidations, assaults and murders perpetrated against them and they are finally banding together in a show of force.
Under the banner of “Por tu derecho a saber y mi derecho a informar” (For your right to know and my right to inform), this Saturday, journalists across Mexico will march against the violence targeting them and the country’s free press.
In Mexico City, journalists will meet at the foot of the Angel of Independence at noon to show their dissatisfaction with the government’s handling of the 11 still missing journalists and the 67 unsolved deaths.
Being journalists, the marches will be live tweeted at losqueremovivos and carry the hashtag #niunomas.
