In Mexico and Honduras, state agents target journalists while governments claim to protect them

This article was commissioned and first published by The Conversation – the news, science and arts website written entirely by academics. You can read the original version here.

Humberto Padgett was reporting on the effects of drought in Cuitzeo, a rural area of central Mexico, when his car was intercepted by armed men on September 13 2024. They threatened him and stole the car, his identity papers and work equipment, including two bullet-proof jackets.

Padgett, a Mexican investigative journalist and author, was reporting on Mexico’s growing environmental worries for national talk radio station Radio Fórmula. It proved to be his last assignment for the station. Two days later, he tweeted:

“Today I’m leaving journalism indefinitely. The losses I’ve suffered, the harassment and threats my family and I have endured, and the neglect I’ve faced have forced me to give up after 26 years of work. Thank you and good luck.”

Padgett made this decision despite the fact he, like many other journalists in Mexico, has been enrolled in a government protection scheme for years – the Protection Mechanism for Journalists and Human Rights Defenders, set up in 2012. Several other Latin American countries have similar protection programmes, including Honduras since 2015.

These programmes offer journalists measures such as panic buttons and emergency phone alerts, police or private security patrols, and security cameras and alarm systems for their homes and offices. Some are provided with bodyguards – at times, Padgett has received 24-hour protection.

In Honduras, reporter Wendy Funes, founder of the online news site RI, was given a police bodyguard after being threatened while covering an extortion trial that linked the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), an international criminal gang, with the Honduran government of former president Juan Orlando Hernández, who is now serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for drug trafficking and arms offences.

Yet even once journalists are enrolled in these government protection schemes, the attacks and threats continue. Shockingly, many come from state employees who, in both Mexico and Honduras, are thought to be responsible for almost half of all attacks on journalists. But the prospect of punishment is remote: at least 90% of attacks on journalists go unprosecuted and unpunished, meaning there is little deterrent for committing these crimes.

Both Mexico and Honduras currently have leftwing governments which have promised to protect journalists, following a long history of crimes against media professionals in both countries. Yet the risk to journalists posed by the state has worsened in recent years amid increasing use of spyware, online smear campaigns, and rising levels of anti-media rhetoric.

Journalists perceived as critical of the leadership are regularly accused of being corrupt, in the pay of foreign governments, and putting out fake news. Donald Trump’s vocal criticism of mainstream media since returning to power in the US is likely to have encouraged this anti-media hostility in Mexico and Honduras, as elsewhere in the world.

Many journalists there have developed strategies for self-protection, including setting up NGOs that support colleagues at risk. But while they are doing journalism in ways that make reporting safer, their work has been further threatened by the abrupt suspension of USAID and other US grants, which is heightening the dangers faced by journalists in Latin America and around the world.

Threats from the state

When I tell people about my research into how journalists in Latin America deal with the relentless violence and impunity, their first question is usually: “Oh, you mean drug cartels?” And indeed, both Padgett and Funes have received death threats for their investigations into cartels and other organised crime groups.

Padgett was once sent an unsolicited photo of a dismembered body in a morgue. He was beaten and kicked in the head by armed men who threatened to kill him and his family while he was reporting on drug dealing on a university campus in Mexico City in 2017. He wears a bullet-proof jacket – or did until it was stolen – and keeps his home address a closely guarded secret.

But cartels and gangs are only part of the story when it comes to anti-press violence and impunity in these countries. In many ways, the bigger story is the threat from the state. This has been a constant despite changes in government, whether right or left wing.

My research project and resulting book were inspired by my work providing advocacy, practical and moral support for journalists at risk in Latin America for an international NGO between 2007 and 2016. The extent of the risk posed by state agents – acting alone or in cahoots with organised crime groups – is clear from the many journalists I’ve spoken to in both Mexico and Honduras.

I first interviewed these reporters, and the organisations that assist them, in 2018, then again in 2022-23 (89 interviews in total), to chart how journalists struggle for protection and justice from the state in the face of growing challenges at both domestic and international level.

For both Padgett and Funes, the intimidation, threats and attacks from organised crime groups often followed them reporting on state agents and their alleged links with such groups. Organised crime groups have deeply infiltrated the fabric of society in many parts of Mexico and Honduras – including politics, state institutions, justice and law enforcement, particularly at a local level.

In Padgett’s case, the suspected cartel threats came after he published a book and investigation into links between state governments and drug cartels, including drug money for political campaigns in Tamaulipas and a surge in cartel-related violence in Morelos under a certain local administration.

Padgett had first joined the federal protection mechanism after he was attacked by police when filming a raid in central Mexico City in 2016. The police confiscated his phone and arrested him.

He was later assigned an around-the-clock bodyguard after the Mexico City prosecutor’s office made available his contact details and his risk assessment and protection plan – produced by the state programme that was supposed to safeguard him – for inclusion in the court file on the 2017 attack on him at the university. This meant the criminals behind the attack had full access to this information.

Being part of this protection programme did not stop the threats by state employees. In April 2024, while trying to report from the scene of the murder of a local mayoral candidate in Guanajuato state, Padgett was punched in the face by a police officer from the state prosecutor’s office, who also smashed his glasses and deleted his photos.

Years earlier, he had been subjected to a protracted legal battle by former Mexico state governor and presidential candidate Eruviel Ávila Villegas, who sued Padgett for “moral damages” to the tune of more than half a million US dollars. His offence? A 2017 profile which mentioned that the politician had attended parties where a bishop had sexually abused male minors.

Padgett eventually won the case – but only on appeal, thanks to a pro bono legal team, after 18 months of stress and travelling to attend the hearings. This is a part of a growing trend of “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (Slapps) in Mexico and Latin America, aimed at silencing journalists and other critical voices.

As Padgett put it: “[Even] once we manage to win, there are no consequences for the politicians who call us to a trial without merit – no consequences at all. Eruviel Ávila is still a senator for the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]” – and he was not even liable for costs.

Mexico’s federal government and army have also carried out illegal surveillance of the mobile phones of journalists and human rights defenders investigating federal government corruption and serious human rights violations on multiple occasions, including by using Pegasus spyware.

In Honduras, Funes is no stranger to state harassment either. In 2011, she was among around 100 journalists, many of them women, who were teargassed and beaten with truncheons by officers of the presidential guard and the national police during a peaceful protest against journalist murders.

In recent years, according to Funes, she and her team at RI have been targeted by cyberattacks and orchestrated smear campaigns on social media that have sought to tar them as being corrupt or associated with criminal gangs. She suspects the army is behind some of these attacks since RI has written in favour of demilitarising the police. Several RI team members have been stopped at army checkpoints; when they have denounced this on TikTok or Facebook, they have been flooded by negative comments.

RI has also been attacked by government supporters unhappy with its critical coverage of the Honduras president Xiomara Castro’s leftwing administration. In August 2024, Funes was threatened with prosecution by the governor of Choluteca, southern Honduras, over RI’s investigation into alleged involvement by local government officials in migrant trafficking. And earlier in 2025, Funes and a human rights activist were subjected to misogynistic and sexist diatribes and threats by the head of customs for the same regional department, for demanding justice for a murdered environmental defender.

Almost half of all attacks on journalists in Mexico and Honduras are attributable to state agents, particularly at the local level. In Mexico, the NGO Article 19 has attributed 46% of all such assaults over the last decade to state agents including officials, civil servants and the armed forces.

In Honduras, according to the Committee for Free Expression (C-Libre), 45% of attacks on journalists in the first quarter of 2024 were attributed to state agents, up from 41% in 2021. These include the national police, the Military Public Order Police, officials and members of the government.

Impunity is a fact of life

One key reason for the failure of the journalist protection schemes in Mexico and Honduras is they lack the power to investigate, prosecute and punish those responsible for the attacks that caused the journalists to enter the programmes in the first place.

Padgett is yet to see justice, either for the attack on him by drug dealers at the university campus almost eight years ago or the results of the official investigation into the Mexico City prosecutor office’s apparent leaking of his contact details to the assailants. When he asked the prosecutor’s office for an update on its investigation in June 2024, he was told it had been closed two years earlier. His request for a copy of the file was denied.

When he went to the office to ask why, he was detained by police officers. “This is justice in Mexico City,” he said in a video he filmed during his arrest, adding:

“Drug dealing is allowed. My personal data is leaked to the organised crime [group] that threatened to kill me and my family. Then the matter is shelved. I come to ask for my file and instead of giving it to me, they take me to court. That is the reality today.”

Padgett lodged a complaint and, following “a tortuous judicial process”, eventually managed to get the investigation re-opened. But he says he has lost hope in the process and the justice system in general. Even something as simple as filing a report on the theft of his bullet-proof jacket during the armed attack in September 2024 has proved beyond the official responsible for the task, so the protection programme has not replaced it.

Funes says she reported one of the cyber-attacks on RI to the special prosecutor established by Honduras in 2018 to investigate crimes against journalists and human rights defenders. Funes provided the name and mobile phone number used by the hacker. However, she said the case was later closed for “lack of merit”.

Previously, the official investigation into the 2011 attack on her and other women journalists had also been quietly shelved after the evidence was “lost”. Funes says this put her off reporting subsequent incidents to the authorities:

“What for? I just want them to protect me … why waste my time? Really, you get used to impunity, you normalise it.”

There have been a few important advances in Mexico in recent years, including the successful prosecution of some of those behind the 2017 murder of two high-profile journalists, Javier Valdez and Miroslava Breach, but such cases remain the exception. Around 90% of attacks on journalists still go unprosecuted and unpunished by the state in both Mexico and Honduras, meaning there is little deterrent against these crimes.

Safer, better ways of working

Many of the journalists I have interviewed prioritise covering under-reported issues relating to human rights and democracy, corruption, violence and impunity. They use in-depth, investigative journalism to try to reveal the truth about what is happening in their countries – which is often obscured by the failings and corruption of the justice system and rule of law.

Many are developing safer, better ways of working, with three strategies having grown noticeably in recent years: building collaborations, seeking international support, and professionalising their ways of working.

Journalists from different media outlets often overcome professional rivalries to collaborate on sensitive and dangerous stories. In Mexico, members of some journalists’ collectives and networks alert each other of security risks on the ground, share and corroborate information, and monitor their members during risky assignments. Others travel as a group – when investigating the mass graves used by drug cartels, for example.

In Mexico and increasingly in Honduras, they publish controversial stories, such as on serious human rights violations involving the state, in more than one outlet simultaneously to reduce the chance of individual journalists being targeted in reprisal. Such collaborations build trust, solidarity and mutual support among reporters and editors – something that has traditionally been lacking in both countries.

Increasingly, international media partners also play an important role regarding the safety of Mexican and Honduran journalists and amplifying public awareness of the issues they report on – encouraging the mainstream media in their own countries to take notice and increasing pressure on their governments to act.

According to Jennifer Ávila, director of the Honduran investigative journalism platform ContraCorriente, transnational collaborations are a “super-important protection mechanism” because they give journalists access to external editors and legal assistance – as well as help leaving the country if necessary.

International partners also bring increased resources. In Mexico and Honduras, as in other Latin American countries, the main source of funding is government advertising and other state financial incentives. But these come with expectations about influence over editorial policies and content, so are not an option for most independent outlets. Private advertising is also challenging for these and other reasons. So, most independent media outlets and journalistic projects are heavily dependent on US and European donors such as the National Endowment for Democracy (Ned), Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations.

Much of Latin America has high levels of media concentration, with the mainstream media typically being owned by a handful of wealthy individuals or families with wider business interests – and close economic and political links to politicians and the state. Combined with the strings of government advertising, this often results in “soft” censorship of the content that these outlets publish. Some journalists are escaping this either by setting up their own media digital outlets, like Funes, or by going freelance – as Padgett has decided to do following the attack on him in Cuitzeo in 2024.

At the same time, there has been a widespread raising of standards through increased training in techniques such as journalistic ethics, making freedom of information requests, digital and investigative journalism, and covering elections. This all helps to promote “journalistic security” – using information as a “shield in such a way that no one can deny what you’re saying”, according to Daniela Pastrana of the NGO Journalists on the Ground (PdP). It also helps counter the perception – and in some cases, reality – of longstanding corruption in parts of the profession.

Hostile environment puts progress at risk

Despite the promise of transforming journalism through increasing collaboration, professionalisation and international support, the current outlook for journalists in Mexico and Honduras – and other countries in Latin America – is not encouraging. Hostile government rhetoric against independent reporters and media outlets is on the rise, despite the presidents of both Mexico and Honduras having pledged to protect journalists and freedom of expression.

In Honduras, the hostile rhetoric towards journalists is growing in the run-up to the presidential elections in November. According to Funes: “There is a violent public discourse from the government which is repeated by officials [and] prepares the ground for worse attacks on the press … This is dangerous.”

In both countries, such attitudes at the top are often replicated by local politicians and citizens, including online, with the threat of violent discourse leading to physical violence. This hostility appears likely to grow given the example of Donald Trump’s aggressive and litigious attitude towards journalists and the media in the United States.

Indeed, the policies of the second Trump administration are already jeopardising progress made in terms of transforming journalism in Mexico and Honduras. In late January 2025, the US government suspended international aid and shuttered USAID, amid unsubstantiated accusations of fraud and corruption.

According to the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders, the USAID freeze included more than US$268m (£216m) that had been allocated to support “independent media and the free flow of information” in 2025.

USAID has been a key funder of organisations such as the nonprofits Internews and Freedom House, which in turn have been vital to the development of independent and investigative journalism in Latin America through their support of new media outlets, journalistic projects and media freedom groups. Another important donor, Ned – a bipartisan nonprofit organisation largely funded by the US Congress – has had its funding frozen.

Uncertainty about future funding has led to the immediate suspension of operations and layoffs by many nonprofit media organisations in Mexico, Honduras and across the region. While this seismic shift in the Latin American media landscape reinforces the urgent need to diversify its sources of funding, there is no doubt that in the short and even medium term, it has dealt a serious blow to the development of free and independent journalism and the safety of all journalists.

In a region of increasingly authoritarian leaders, it is now a lot harder to hold them accountable for corruption, human rights violations, impunity and other abuses.

International impotence

Anti-press violence and impunity are global problems, with more than 1,700 journalists killed worldwide between 2006 and 2024 – around 85% of which went unpunished, according to Unesco.

Although international organisations, protection mechanisms and pressure can be important tools in the fight against anti-press violence and impunity, they are ultimately limited in impact due to their reliance on the state to comply. Some journalists in Mexico and Honduras suggest the impact of such international attention can even be counter-productive, due to their governments’ increasing hostility toward any criticism by international organisations, journalists and other perceived opponents.

Twenty years ago, Lydia Cacho, a renowned journalist and women’s rights activist, was arbitrarily detained and tortured in Puebla state, east-central Mexico, after publishing a book exposing a corruption and child sexual exploitation network involving authorities and well-known businessmen. Unable to get redress for her torture through the Mexican justice system, Cacho eventually took her case to the United Nations.

Finally, in 2018, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that her rights had been violated and ordered the Mexican state to re-open the investigation into the attack, and to give her adequate compensation. This judgment has led to several arrests of state agents in Puebla, including a former governor and chief of the judicial police and several police officers, as well as a public apology from the federal government.

But cases like Cacho’s are the exception. Securing rulings from international bodies requires resources and energy, the help of NGOs or lawyers – and can take years. What’s more, enforcement of international decisions relies on the state to comply.

While international pressure was key to persuading the Mexican and Honduran states to set up their government protection schemes for journalists and specialised prosecutors to investigate attacks against them, these institutions have generally proved ineffective.

Resourcing is always an issue: typically, protection mechanisms and prosecutors’ offices are underfunded and the staff are poorly trained. Some bodies have limited mandates, such as protection mechanisms that lack the power to investigate attacks on journalists. Sometimes, these failings are believed to be deliberate. According to Padgett, the Mexican journalist protection scheme has “political biases against those whom officials consider to be hostile to the regime”.

Indeed, many journalists and support groups suspect the Mexican and Honduran governments don’t really want these institutions to work. As the pro-democracy judge Guillermo López Lone commented about the repeated failure to secure convictions for crimes against journalists and human rights defenders in Honduras: “These are international commitments [made] due to pressure, but there is no political will.”

López Lone, who was illegally removed from his position after the 2009 coup in Honduras and only reinstated as a judge after a years-long struggle, including a ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, alleged that these institutions “play a merely formal role” in Honduras, because they have been “captured by the political interests of the current rulers, and by criminal networks”.

Similarly, according to Sara Mendiola, director of Mexico City-based NGO Propuesta Cívica, it’s not enough to talk about a lack of resources or training: “Even if you doubled the [state] prosecutors’ offices’ budgets, you’d still have the same impunity because the structures [that generate impunity] remain.”

Activism is a risky business

It’s clear that in both Mexico and Honduras, despite the governments’ stated commitment to freedom of expression, there is a deep-seated ambivalence about how important or desirable it is to protect journalists and media freedom.

The heart of this issue is the contradiction of the state as both protector and perpetrator – a state that does not want to, or is incapable of, constraining or investigating itself and its allies. This in turn is linked to longstanding structural problems of corruption, impunity and human rights violations, and a legacy of controlling the media dating to pre-democracy days.

Activism by journalists against this situation – another form of self-protection – takes various forms, including public protests and advocacy, and working for and setting up NGOs that support colleagues at risk. Increasingly, activism also involves the coming together of those who are the victims of violence.

In Mexico City, groups of journalists displaced from their homes by threats and attacks, many of whom end up without a job or income, have formed collectives and networks to provide mutual support and assist colleagues in similar circumstances. In Veracruz state, the Network in Memory of and Struggle for Killed and Disappeared Journalists was formed by the relatives of the many such journalists in 2022.

But activism is a risky business in Mexico and Honduras, opening journalists and their loved ones up to further repression and attacks by the state – and sometimes raising questions about their impartiality and credibility. While many journalists have taken part in activism out of necessity or desperation, in both countries their main source of optimism in the face of violence and impunity is journalism itself.

Journalism as the solution

Fortunately, journalists like Padgett don’t give up easily. After an eight-month hiatus following the attack in Cuitzeo and its aftermath, he now feels ready to go back to reporting.

Although he succeeded in getting the shelved investigation into the 2017 attack on him and subsequent data leak reopened, the lack of any action since means he’s decided to draw a line under this labyrinthine process. He is now looking for “alternative means of justice to compensate for the impunity”.

As a part of the reparations, he has been promised a formal apology from the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office (similar to the apology received by Cacho). Such a ceremony is not justice and may largely be symbolic, but Padgett feels it will allow him to move on and focus on journalism again – this time as a freelancer. He is keen to make the point that Mexico remains “an extraordinary place to be a reporter”.

Despite the lack of state protection and all the other challenges, journalists like Padgett and Funes are determined to keep going – investigating their countries’ ills, probing the root causes, transforming their profession. Their commitment offers a ray of hope for the emergence of a truly free and independent media in Mexico, Honduras and beyond.

Tamsin Mitchell’s new book, Human Rights, Impunity and Anti-Press Violence: How Journalists Survive and Resist, is published by Routledge.

Wendy Funes: Despite the pain that violence has left in Honduras it is wonderful to see a world with so much solidarity

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2018 Freedom of Expression Journalism Award-winner and 2018 Journalism Fellow Honduran investigative journalist Wendy Funes at the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards (Photo: Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship)

2018 Freedom of Expression Journalism Award-winner and 2018 Journalism Fellow Honduran investigative journalist Wendy Funes at the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards (Photo: Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship)

“Despite my fears and the pain that violence has left in my country, it has been wonderful to see that it has been worthwhile to dream in a world with so much solidarity,” Wendy Funes, winner of the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards Fellowship for Journalism, told Index on Censorship.

Freedom of expression has suffered a steep decline in Honduras, a country where 70 journalists have been killed over the last nine years, with Gabriel Hernández’s murder on 17 March marking the first of 2019. Wendy Funes, an investigative reporter who runs her own online news website, Reporteros de Investigacion, is one of the few remaining journalists in the country that continues reporting and investigating issues despite the immense pressure to remain silent.

As a woman journalist in Honduras, a country in which gender-based violence is a serious issue, as is violence against journalists, Funes finds it important to attend events for women in leadership, such as the one she attended in Mexico City with the Center for Women’s Global Leadership.

“It helped me to realise that I am not alone in the continent and to know that there are other places with women who are specialised and do methodical and rigorous work,” said Funes.

Although she has faced a great deal of adversity as a woman journalist, Funes considers herself lucky having been given the opportunity to study and have a career in journalism, when seven out of every ten Hondurans live in poverty, with more than a million children without access to school and a small percentage of people who finish high school.

2019 is proving to be a busy year for Funes as she undertakes a new project, Sembrando el Periodismo de Investigacion en Honduras, with the help of a grant from National Endowment for Democracy. The project consists of four major investigations, two of which Funes and her team are currently working on.

The first is an investigation into the Trans 450, a transmetro that was promised to Hondurans and cost them $9 million, but has not been put into operation yet. The second investigation examines the impunity on aggressions against freedom of expression.

“The NED project is our first significant project and the support and respect they have shown for our work is really important to us,” said Funes.

The biggest project Funes has planned for the future, however, is the building of a Centre for Investigative Journalism that will be the first centre of its kind in Honduras.

“We want the office to become a training space for press and media professionals, advocates, professionals from universities, and academics who wish to learn,” said Funes.

In preparation for building the centre, Funes and her team are working with Factum magazine of El Salvador to train journalists and students. They will hold the first workshop in April of this year and the hope is that they will develop a network of journalists that will then serve as the foundation for the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

“For now, our priority is to strengthen our office and our business model, to nurture alliances and strengthen the network that will one day become the centre we are talking about,” said Funes.

Being an Index fellow has opened up many new opportunities for Funes, but has also renewed her own sense of confidence in herself as a woman and as a journalist.

“Index appeared in my life as a gift of providence and helped me at a very fundamental moment because the award coincided with the year I made the decision found my own newspaper,” said Funes. “They showcased me and my work and many more people followed in encouraging and supporting me.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1554114253076-1aebf9f6-f8dd-7″ taxonomies=”10735″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Wendy Funes: Fear is a weapon used against the vulnerable in Honduras

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2018 Freedom of Expression Journalism Award-winner and 2018 Journalism Fellow Honduran investigative journalist Wendy Funes at the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards (Photo: Elina Kansikas)

2018 Freedom of Expression Journalism Award-winner and 2018 Journalism Fellow Honduran investigative journalist Wendy Funes at the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards (Photo: Elina Kansikas)

“Violence is a way of keeping society under control because a lot of what people do or don’t do is a reaction to fear,” Wendy Funes, winner of the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards Fellowship for Journalism, tells Index on Censorship. “It becomes an indirect method of control, not just over society, but journalism as well.”

Funes worries this kind of violence has become “normalised” in Honduras and says the shooting and wounding of journalist Geovanny Sierra — who has survived numerous attempts on his life — by military police while covering protests of electoral fraud in late November is just the latest example. The Honduran authorities issued a statement saying that law enforcement was attacked first, which is why they started shooting. “With this they have justified the crime,” Funes says, adding that nothing is being done about the attacks on journalists in the country: “The most terrible thing is the impunity that exists because if something like this happened in another country it would a scandal, but here it is already forgotten.”

Funes is no stranger to covering either corruption or protest and has had her own brushes with heavy-handed state forces, although she says for the most part she has been lucky. “I’ve had training opportunities in self-protection and security,” she says. “I am also very cautious — I try to plan my routes and if I go inter dangerous areas, I try to have a safety protocol, to have alliances with civil society groups, so if something happens to me I can let them know.”

Recently, Funes’ investigative website Reporteros de Investigacion has been focusing on issues such as human trafficking, violence against student protesters, femicide and the high-level cocaine trafficking case involving Juan Antonio Hernández, brother of Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. The website has also been covering the caravan of people fleeing persecution, poverty and violence in the country. “They are facing a very cruel situation,” Funes says.

Honduran migrant Daniel Portillo

Honduran migrant Daniel Portillo

Although Reporteros de Investigacion doesn’t have the resources to cross the border, it has been working closely with some of those who have fled, such as 25-year-old Daniel Portillo, who left Honduras in search of the “American dream”. Portillo is now in Mexico. “He has found someone who works with migrants and helps migrants,” Funes, who first met him when she was covering protests in San Pedro Sula, a city in the northwest of Honduras, said. “He is a young person with a lot of leadership qualities, a lot of desire to advocate for other young people.”

While in Honduras Portillo organised sports tournaments in an area controlled by the criminal gang MS-13. “He resisted joining the gang,” Funes says. “He was always trying to negotiate with them so that he could help other young people so they wouldn’t get into drugs or alcohol.”

Writing in Reporteros de Investigacion, Portillo explains the difficulty of explaining to his young daughter that he left so she could have a better future: “If God allows it, we will see each other again or else, I am writing this letter to you in case unfortunately they killed me on the way and buried me; my heart is that of a warrior and I will continue forward, whatever happens, my mother suffers for my departure.”

“He told me that he has seen many people carved up since he was a child,” Funes tells Index. “Violence weighed on his psyche and made him very vulnerable young person. He told me that he looked for employment in Honduras, and when he could not find he decided to migrate with the caravan.”

It is such vulnerability that makes poor Hondurans so susceptible to human trafficking. “It’s like Russian roulette,” Funes says. “I have come to realise that there are many Hondurans who have an eagerness to migrate to the USA, but have ended up staying in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Belize and have become victims of sexual exploitation, domestic service and forced matrimonies as they flee from gangs and narco-politics. Some of the people who have left come back mutilated because they lose limbs on the trains.”

For those that do make it to the USA, they face discrimination, but at least they have the opportunity for better salaries, with which they can send money to their families struggling back home, Funes says. These remittances play a key role in sustaining the Honduran economy. In May 2018 Hondurans abroad sent back an all-time high of $456.2 million in a single month.

While Funes would like to see more Hondurans stay at home, not only to avoid the very real risks that come with being a migrant, but also to fight for real change, she is all too aware of why people choose instead to leave. “You have to work five times harder than a corrupt individual to be able to sustain yourself and get ahead in Honduras. This economic model displaces the most vulnerable individuals.”

Much of what Funes and her team do over the next year will be geared towards her dream of founding a centre of investigative journalism, including training journalists and students with the help of Factum magazine in El Salvador. “This will bring together many different journalists who want to transform Honduras with investigative journalism,” Funes says.

With a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, Funes and her team will also work on a project called Sembrando el Periodismo de Investigación en Honduras (Sowing Investigative Journalism In Honduras), which will involve four major investigations over the course of 2019.

“Many of the things that I dreamt of happening one day, in an idealistic way, have become reality, all thanks to Index,” Funes adds. “Solidarity, love and friendship are really the things that can move this world, and that is what Index is made of with all of the support they have extended to me.”

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Honduras: False story seeks to discredit digital newspaper Reporteros de Investigacion

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_single_image image=”100749″ img_size=”full”][vc_column_text]Two days after the publication of an investigation into alleged inappropriate behaviour by a member of a Honduran military unit involving young female students, digital newspaper Reportero de Investigacion was targeted with a misleading story that purported to be from the outlet.

The news outlet, which was founded by 2018 Freedom of Expression Awards Fellowship winner Wendy Funes, had posted an 8 June 2018 article which exposed how members of a military unit were going into schools, teaching children without parental consent or notification, collecting personal information and, in at least one case, texting sexually harassing messages under the guise of the “No Drugs, Live Better” programme. The Reportero de Investigacion article included screenshots of a text conversation between a mother and a military officer. The officer thought they were texting the woman’s daughter. 

The publication drew a large amount of the attention in Honduras, which is one of the world’s most dangerous places to be a journalist. 

Two days later, a faked article began appearing that used the Reportero de Investigacion logo and included screenshots from gang members who discussed the difficulties of distributing drugs, claiming they had less access after the military had begun its in-school training programme. The false article is being shared on WhatsApp groups among members of the law enforcement community in Honduras, Funes told Index on Censorship. 

This is not the first time that fake news stories have been circulated in Honduras to discredit the work of investigative journalists and human rights activists and undermine their personal security.

For Funes, it is vital that the appropriate government agencies investigate these false publications. She said she will be addressing a complaint to the new Honduran Special Prosecutor for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, Journalists, Social Communicators and Justice Operators, (FEPRODDHH), which has the responsibility for determining where the faked article purporting to be from reporterosdeinvestigación.com came from.

“For us it is necessary to carry out an investigation, although we do not have the certainty that it is a smear campaign against our newspaper, we believe that an investigation is urgent to determine the origin of the messages and the State has the tools necessary to do it.” Funes said.

Perla Hinojosa, fellowships and advocacy officer at Index on Censorship said: “It’s important to call out efforts to discredit the investigative work of journalists like Wendy. Even though this was not a direct physical threat, the spread of false information undermines Wendy’s news organisation, which seeks justice and identifies human rights abuses.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1528734389898-5507b00f-068d-2″ taxonomies=”23255″][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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