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.

Mexico: Obrador’s attacks on freedom reach new heights

In a world where there are too many tyrants and our politics seems increasingly divisive it is all too easy to look away, to turn off the news, to refuse to engage.

Yet there is a responsibility on all of us to bear witness. To hear people’s stories and to stand with those dissidents who are brave enough to speak truth to power.

In recent weeks, we have been reminded of how important this is, in countries that don’t always dominate the headlines.

In the ongoing battle for genuine freedom of expression in Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s relentless attacks on journalists and democratic institutions have reached alarming heights, posing a severe threat to press freedom and democracy in the country.

The latest incident involved an investigation by a New York Times journalist into the Obrador administration’s alleged connections with drug cartels. The report led to Obrador sharing the journalist’s telephone number during a televised press conference  – this is a blatant attack on freedom of the press. By exposing a journalist to potential harm, Obrador is sending a chilling message to the media: report critically at your own risk.

These actions would be bad enough – but are compounded by Obrador’s proposals to overhaul democratic institutions, such as the election authority INE and the Supreme Court. Obrador is seemingly seeking to consolidate power and the democratic checks and balances which exist in any healthy democracy.

His proposal to directly elect both board members of the INE and Supreme Court judges threatens to politicise these institutions and erode their independence. Civil society groups, academics, and the opposition have rightly warned that such changes would undermine the very foundation of democracy in Mexico.

The widespread protests that erupted last Sunday, with thousands of Mexicans taking to the streets to reject Obrador’s vision, are a testament to the growing dissatisfaction with his authoritarian tendencies and for me a celebration of freedom of expression against one of the world’s less well known tyrants.

Obrador was faced by a sea of pink — the colour of INE’s logo — and thousands of national flags demonstrating a united front against the erosion of the democratic principles which the people of Mexico seem rightly reluctant to abandon.

I stand with the people of Mexico who will not bend to a tyrant. Obrador seeks to be a strong man – his actions show us exactly what he is a weak man – afraid of his citizens.

At the beginning of last year Obrador was voted Tyrant of the Year 2022 in Index on Censorship’s public vote. This recognition was based on his appalling record on media freedom. His response to our public poll was to attack the messenger rather than consider the message – again at a televised press conference.

Behind each action taken by Obrador to consolidate power is a victim. It may be a journalist, an independent member of the judiciary or an observer of Mexico’s elections. Each one embodies the democratic rights that we hold dear. Each of them wants to live in a thriving Mexico that can stand proud in its belief in freedom of expression for all. I stand in solidarity with the journalists and citizens of Mexico who are bravely speaking out against censorship and authoritarianism. I stand with those people exposing his authoritarian nature. And I stand with those who bravely seek to speak truth to power.

Index will continue to shine a spotlight on Obrador’s assault on freedom of expression because the future of Mexico’s democracy demands our attention.

In Mexico, a journalist is attacked every 13 hours. The government is to blame

Mexico is torn between two opposing forces. On one side are the balaclava-clad sicarios and cartels of popular culture. On the other, a government that is becoming ever more obsessed with the appearance of power and glory. The army has been deployed to the streets across the country. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador talks frequently about subverting the constitution to allow his re-election.

For journalists, the imperative to report the truth has never been stronger. There are too many stories to tell – the realities of crime – the institutional corruption that has mired Mexico for some many years – the inefficiency of the flagship ‘Fourth Transformation’ that the current government has staked its reputation on.

Those involved in these stories, however, do not want them to be told. 2022 was one of the deadliest years on record for journalists in Mexico, with 12 murders, and was the most violent with 696 attacks recorded, according to a new report from Article 19. The overwhelming majority of these attacks will go unsolved. Many will never even be investigated.

Forty-two percent of the documented attacks are committed by state actors, the report says.

Nowhere are the problems facing journalists more apparent than in Ecatepec – a sprawling shanty town of squat, concrete dwellings, precariously perched on the mountainsides that surround the capital. Here, the contempt for the press is laid bare. Local journalists are targeted. Foreign journalists are threatened. Here, organised crime and governance go hand in hand.

Cody Copeland, a US journalist working in Mexico, attended a rally in the district, when he discovered that officials from the ruling Morena party in attendance were wearing medallions of Santa Muerte – the patron saint of cartels. The mayor himself was not a career politician, but, according to the newspaper Reforma, a former leader of a band of pirate taxis. Many fear criminal activities are now being carried out in an official capacity.

When questioned about why Ecatepec had seen no running water in five months, Copeland was violently removed from the press conference. Later, he said, a woman from the Morena party attempted to lure him away with promises of an exclusive interview – but residents intervened, suspecting he was likely to be attacked, and drove him away to safety, back in the city.

Copeland believes it is likely that his equipment would have been destroyed if he had been detained.

The greatest dangers are faced by those covering local affairs – where they are likely to be people known in their community. Reporters here are often targeted, and many are unable to leave their homes in fear of reprisals.

Carlos Flores is a local reporter, who lives in Ecatepec. Despite the fact reporting here has always been hard, he feels that under Morena things have only got worse.

“The current government we have is even harder than the previous ones. They are very tight-lipped. With previous governments, you still had some freedom [to report], but with the current one, I feel there are no guarantees for journalism – not in Ecatepec or anywhere else in the republic,” Flores said.

Flores has been attacked three times in recent years – twice, he said, by government forces.

When Flores is at the scene of a crime, police will often tell families not to speak to journalists – obscuring the extent to which the government has failed to handle crime in the area. If he persists, Flores explains, he is likely to be removed by police, and have his equipment destroyed.

President Obrador has frequently dismissed the idea of links between criminal gangs and government, as well as denying claims that large parts of Mexico being controlled by cartels and rubbishing reports that his government spies on activists, journalists and opponents. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Just last week, for example, it was confirmed that his government had monitored the phone of a human rights activist (Obrador said this was lawful, part of a probe into a suspected cartel member).

As for government support for the press, this is available but is largely funnelled into media conglomerates seen as friendly to Morena – La Jornada, Televisa and TV Azteca. These outlets are safe – allowing the appearance of supporting the press without risking serious adverse coverage or investigation.

To make matters worse, Obrador is currently embroiled in a battle to criminalise dissent against the government during election periods. While these reforms appear to have been defeated for now, his attempts to consolidate power are often directed at those who he believes to be naysayers – in particular journalists who are critical of his record.

It is not uncommon for Obrador to use his daily press conference to target individual journalists he believes have wronged him, and to decry outlets that have slighted him as pawns of the opposition, including Index on Censorship. This delegitimisation of the media is accepted by many of his supporters, who gleefully join him in deriding attempts to expose wrongdoing in an administration that appears – despite pleas to the contrary – as corrupt as those that came before.

The presidential elections next year will likely see a new Morena candidate elected to power.  The question for Mexico is – will they value freedom of the press?

Tyrant of the year 2022: Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico

“He who has nothing to hide, has nothing to fear”. These were the words uttered by the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador in a February 2022 press conference held the day after Heber López Vásquez, founder and director of the digital news outlets NoticiasWeb and RCP Noticias, was shot and killed. However this was not a call for greater transparency and action to respond to the ever-climbing rate of journalist murders in Mexico. He was publishing what he alleged were the confidential financial details of leading journalist, Carlos Loret de Mola, in response to the journalist’s reporting.

“This act of intimidation and the abuse of the presidential office would be egregious in any circumstance. However In Mexico, against a backdrop of rampant impunity and one of the worst track records for the safety of journalists, it is far worse than that,” says Index’s policy and campaigns officer Nik Williams. “According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 151 journalists and press workers have been killed in Mexico since 1992. The causes of these murders are complex; but a messy tangle of narco-politics, organised crime, corrupt police and state officials and runaway impunity has made Mexico one of the most dangerous locations to be a journalist outside a warzone. In fact, so far in 2022, Mexico is second only to Ukraine for the number of journalists killed.

Since Obrador only came to power in 2018, it would be overly-simplistic to lay this solely at his feet. However, according to Article 19, attacks on the press have increased by 85% since he took power, with every single Mexican state witnessing such incidents for the first time in 2021.

When there is a culture of impunity and the devaluing of journalists, the scene is set for violence. It is this erosion of the civic fabric that makes Article 19’s director for Mexico and Central America: “His [Obrador’s] speech causes other political actors to replicate his attacks. These actors feel empowered and allowed to attack in the face of a narrative that presents the press as an adversary. We are in a war speech, where the enemy must be annihilated.”

After publicly leaking Carlos Loret de Mola’s alleged salary and potentially violating Article 16 of the Mexican Constitution in the process, Obrador labelled journalists who are critical of him as “thugs, mercenaries, sellouts” and “the real mafia.” This framing establishes a false and dangerous parallel between the free press and criminal enterprises, further emboldening threats that can soon escalate to violence.

Impunity, the like of which is found in Mexico, requires significant and proactive action to address. It is not something that will just right itself when no one is looking. It requires a commitment to the value of free expression. It requires action. According to Human Rights Watch, “[o]f the 105 investigations into killings of journalists conducted by the federal Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Freedom of Expression (Feadle), since its creation in 2010, just six have led to homicide convictions.” What good is a dedicated prosecutor if the rate of convictions is so low? Not only is this a failure to the family, friends and colleagues of the murdered journalists whose killings are being investigated by Feadle, this is a signal to those seeking to silence critical reporting: you can continue uninterrupted and undisturbed. This weakening of the mechanisms by which journalists can be protected is also seen in the 2020 decision of the Mexican Congress and supported by Obrador, to eliminate the independent funding that supported the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists. Now the mechanism is dependent on the Interior Ministry to pay for protection measures, but funds have been consistently cut. Leading media freedom organisations and 14 members of US Congress have raised concerns about this, seemingly to no avail.

Williams says: “What Obrador sees as a war against the elites, we see as a war against journalists, and ultimately free expression. Without Obrador stepping forward and addressing the ingrained climate of fear and impunity, instead of fixating on those who report on uncomfortable facts, Mexican journalists will remain stuck in the crosshairs of those seeking their silence.”

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