Tijuana journalist killings demand more than new empty promises from Mexican government
The fatal shooting of a journalist in Tijuana earlier this month was horrible. Now it’s happened again. Two truth-tellers, who had publicly feared for their safety as a result of jobs they wouldn’t stop doing, gone just like that, killed outside their homes in Tijuana a week apart, first photojournalist Alfonso Margarito Martínez Esquivel on Jan. 17, then reporter Maria Guadalupe Lourdes Maldonado López on Jan. 23. Last Tuesday the killings led to protests in Tijuana — just 20 miles from downtown San Diego — and in 40 other Mexican cities as sad, angry, scared people demanded justice. But is justice what we will all see?
Baja California Gov. Marina del Pilar Ávila announced a special prosecutor would investigate the killings. On Tuesday, Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told journalists that those responsible would be brought to justice. But, again, is justice what we will ultimately see? Such urgency should have been there Jan. 10 when online journalist José Luis Gamboa was stabbed to death.
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Such urgency should have been there when López Obrador’s interior undersecretary said last month that more than nine in 10 killings of journalists and rights defenders still remain unresolved in the country.
Such urgency should have been there last year when eight journalists were killed in Mexico, more than in any other country worldwide.
It is wrenching and revealing that Maldonado told López Obrador at a live broadcast news conference in 2019 of the threats she faced and the government protection she needed. Baja California Attorney General Ricardo Iván Carpio said she had received several protections, among them a panic button and police patrolling around her house.
Since late 2018, at least 46 journalists have been killed in Mexico. In solved cases, local government officials were responsible nearly half the time. Given that grim fact, López Obrador’s Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas’ assertion that new and better laws could make journalists safer seems preposterous. But something must change when corruption is so rampant that gangs and governments wind up working together against journalists.
An attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.
— The San Diego Union-Tribune
