A state judge ruled Tuesday that any article published by Tribuna in which the governor is mentioned must be approved by the court.

In addition, the judge directed González, who was the editorial director of the newspaper for 30 years until his retirement in 2017, to submit to the court for review any future material in which Sensores is mentioned.

“The verdict against Jorge Luis González and Tribuna is nothing less than a gag order that constitutes a clear case of the courts siding with a state governor in overt efforts to silence any critical reporting of her administration,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “CPJ is alarmed by the sharp increase in lawfare against critical media in Mexico, where journalists continue to be attacked with almost complete impunity.”

The ruling by the Campeche state court is only the latest episode in the ongoing legal assault by Sansores on Tribuna and González, both of whom she sued on June 13, 2025, accusing them of spreading hatred and causing moral damages in coverage of her administration.

It is unclear which specific reports caused the governor to sue Tribuna, González told CPJ. It is also unclear why the lawsuit targets González, as he is no longer with the paper after his retirement in 2017. 

A previous ruling ordered González to pay “moral damages” of $2 million pesos (about USD$110,000) to Sansores and prohibited both the reporter and Tribuna from mentioning the governor in any reports, according to news reports. That sentence was suspended on July 9, after González successfully filed an injunction, which CPJ has reviewed, citing the Mexican Constitution’s prohibition of censorship before publication.

González said he planned to appeal, but it wasn’t immediately clear what strategies were available to him.

Several calls by CPJ to Sansores’ office for comment were unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jan-Albert Hootsen/CPJ Mexico Representative.

A state judge ruled Tuesday that any article published by Tribuna in which the governor is mentioned must be approved by the court.

In addition, the judge directed González, who was the editorial director of the newspaper for 30 years until his retirement in 2017, to submit to the court for review any future material in which Sensores is mentioned.

“The verdict against Jorge Luis González and Tribuna is nothing less than a gag order that constitutes a clear case of the courts siding with a state governor in overt efforts to silence any critical reporting of her administration,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “CPJ is alarmed by the sharp increase in lawfare against critical media in Mexico, where journalists continue to be attacked with almost complete impunity.”

The ruling by the Campeche state court is only the latest episode in the ongoing legal assault by Sansores on Tribuna and González, both of whom she sued on June 13, 2025, accusing them of spreading hatred and causing moral damages in coverage of her administration.

It is unclear which specific reports caused the governor to sue Tribuna, González told CPJ. It is also unclear why the lawsuit targets González, as he is no longer with the paper after his retirement in 2017. 

A previous ruling ordered González to pay “moral damages” of $2 million pesos (about USD$110,000) to Sansores and prohibited both the reporter and Tribuna from mentioning the governor in any reports, according to news reports. That sentence was suspended on July 9, after González successfully filed an injunction, which CPJ has reviewed, citing the Mexican Constitution’s prohibition of censorship before publication.

González said he planned to appeal, but it wasn’t immediately clear what strategies were available to him.

Several calls by CPJ to Sansores’ office for comment were unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jan-Albert Hootsen/CPJ Mexico Representative.

Balderas, a well-known investigative journalist, reported on July 4 on X that he had received a threatening call from un unidentified individual using an unknown number. In the call, that person used profanity and said that Balderas should “tone it down” or he would “face the consequences.” The caller did not specify a particular story Balderas had written.

The next day, Balderas received a message via WhatsApp, again from an unknown number, in which the sender repeated that the journalist should “keep quiet,” while also referring to Balderas’ friend and fellow reporter Luis Chaparro, issuing the same threat to him. Chaparro told CPJ that he had not personally received threats, but that Balderas had notified him of the message and the phone call.

The threats came just weeks after unidentified assailants killed two journalists in Mexico.

“The brazen threats against Óscar Balderas and Luis Chaparro are part of an ongoing campaign to terrorize any journalist who provides in-depth reporting on organized crime in Mexico,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “These threats can only happen in a context of festering impunity for the country’s press, something Mexican authorities continue to fail address.”

Both Balderas and Chaparro are experienced investigative reporters. Balderas hosts and contributes to several news shows on nationally syndicated radio and television channels, including La Saga, Milenio, ADN40, and MVS Noticias. Chaparro, formerly based in the northern city of Ciudad Juárez but now in the United States, hosts online news show Pie de Nota.

Balderas told CPJ that he has been in constant contact with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which is overseen by the interior ministry, about the threats. Neither journalist has filed a report with the police.

An official for the Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent via WhatsApp.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“The lethal attack that took Salomón Ordóñez’s life is a stark reminder of how little President Claudia Sheinbaum has done since assuming office late last year to change the cycle of violence and impunity that plagues journalists,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities can break this cycle by bringing the culprits of this devastating attack to justice.”

Ordóñez, the founder and editor of the Facebook-based Shalom Cuetzalan Produccions, was attacked by unknown assailants at approximately 8 p.m. in Cuetzalan, a town 110 miles northeast of Mexico City,  according to news reports. Witnesses found Ordóñez, 40, with at least two gunshot wounds, the reports added. The journalist died of his injuries at a nearby hospital.

Ordóñez mostly covered cultural news and political events related to local culture, which he shared to his news site’s over 75,000 followers—a significant number in Cuetzalan, which has 50,000 inhabitants. His coverage made him a popular figure in the community, according to a SPD Noticias report.

One journalist from the region, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisal, told CPJ via messaging app that Ordóñez did not cover sensitive political topics, corruption or organized crime in the area.

The Puebla state government, in a short statement released June 24 on Facebook, said the office of the state prosecutor (FGE) is investigating the attack. Several calls by CPJ to the FGE went unanswered.

It is unclear whether Ordóñez had received threats. CPJ was unable to retrieve contact information for his family.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

González, 39, was ambushed and shot dead by unidentified men around 6 p.m. on May 14 in Acapulco’s city center, in the southern state of Guerrero, according to news reports. He died at the scene as his attackers fled. González was leaving a studio interview when he was attacked.

“José Carlos González’s brutal killing the latest in a string of deadly attacks on the press in Mexico – yet another reminder that President Claudia Sheinbaum’s promise that press freedom would be respected in the country continues to be an empty one,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “If Mexican authorities finally want to show their commitment to press freedom, they must bring González’s attackers to justice, lest the impunity that fuels these killings continues unabated.”

González used Facebook as his news site’s platform, where he frequently published short articles, videos and photos on local politics, crime, security, sports, culture, and social protests to his over 143,000 followers. González also posted commentary videos, in which he donned a lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) mask under the pseudonym “Ave Fénix,” without his name or a byline.

González was previously injured in a June 2023, attack, according to a report in El Financiero, a Mexico City newspaper. It is unclear whether he had received any death threats leading up to his killing. 

The Guerrero state public prosecutor’s office has not publicly commented on the killing, and several phone calls by CPJ for comment went unanswered. An official with the Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, a federal agency that provides protection to reporters at risk, told CPJ that González was not incorporated into a protection program sanctioned by the office. The official asked to remain anonymous due to not being authorized to publicly comment on the matter.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

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In what could be a significant escalation of U.S. pressure on Mexico, the Trump administration has begun to impose travel restrictions and other sanctions on prominent Mexican politicians whom it believes are linked to drug corruption, U.S. officials said.

So far, two Mexican political figures have acknowledged being banned from traveling to the United States. But U.S. officials said they expect more Mexicans to be targeted as the administration works through a list of several dozen political figures who have been identified by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as having ties to the drug trade.

The list includes leaders of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s governing party, several state governors and political figures close to her predecessor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the U.S. officials said. They insisted on anonymity to discuss sensitive policy plans.

The governor of the Mexican state of Baja California, Marina del Pilar Ávila, confirmed that she and her husband, a former congressman, were told their U.S. visas were revoked because of “a situation” involving her husband. “The fact that the State Department has cancelled my visa does not mean that I have committed something bad,” she said at a news conference on Monday.

Sheinbaum said her government had asked U.S. officials to explain why Ávila was stripped of her visa but had been told that such matters are private and no further information was given.

The visa actions represent the latest political challenge for the new Mexican leader and her leftist National Regeneration Movement, known as Morena. Despite the country’s historic sensitivity to any hint of U.S. meddling, Sheinbaum has thus far bolstered her support at home by asserting Mexico’s sovereignty in discussions with President Donald Trump while also moving to meet his demands for action against the biggest traffickers.

Mexican journalists reported that U.S. immigration officials also pulled the visa of another border-state governor, Américo Villarreal of Tamaulipas, an assertion that the governor’s spokesperson dismissed as “unconfirmed.” (Villarreal has been frequently accused of having ties to drug trafficking, which he has denied.) Last month, the mayor of that state’s second-largest city, Matamoros, was stopped from crossing the border into Brownsville, Texas, but he, too, insisted he had not been formally stripped of his visa.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that visa records are confidential under U.S. law.

Three U.S. officials said the visa actions will likely in some cases be accompanied by Treasury Department sanctions that block individuals from conducting business with U.S. companies and freeze financial assets they have in the United States. Ávila said that she did not have any U.S. bank accounts and faced no such sanction.

A spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment on the sanctions plan.

When the administration imposed tariffs on Mexico in early March, it asserted that the country’s government had granted “safe havens for the cartels to engage in the manufacturing and transportation of dangerous narcotics, which collectively have led to the overdose deaths of hundreds of thousands of American victims.”

As part of what it has described as an all-out fight against fentanyl and other illegal drugs, the administration has designated some of the biggest Mexican trafficking gangs as terrorist organizations and explored the possibility of unilateral U.S. military actions against them, officials said.

The review of Mexican drug corruption was initiated by a small White House team that requested information from law enforcement agencies and the U.S. intelligence community about Mexican political, government and military figures with criminal ties.

Officials said the group has been shaping the administration’s security policy with Mexico under the leadership of a deputy White House homeland security adviser, Anthony Salisbury. It is overseen by the deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller.

A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment in response to questions about the group’s role in initiating the travel sanctions.

One official familiar with the team’s list said it overlaps with a file of about 35 Mexican officials that was compiled by Drug Enforcement Administration investigators in 2019, after López Obrador began shutting down Mexico’s cooperation with the United States in counterdrug programs.

That earlier effort sought to identify Mexican government figures who could be criminally prosecuted for aiding drug traffickers. It led to the 2019 indictment in the U.S. of the country’s former security chief, Genaro García Luna, and his conviction on drug charges three years later in a New York federal court.

The two former DEA officials in Mexico City who oversaw the compilation of the 2019 list, Terrance Cole and Matthew Donahue, also proposed that the State Department cancel the U.S. visas of some of the Mexican political figures named on it. Senior U.S. diplomats rejected that proposal.

Cole is now awaiting Senate confirmation as the Trump administration’s new DEA administrator.

Some current and former U.S. officials expressed concerns about the latest White House-led plan. They noted that the standard of proof required for both visa cancellations and Treasury sanctions is well below that of a criminal trial, which could encourage proponents of the measures to act on what might be less-than-solid information.

Officials said the visa actions were being taken under Section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which stipulates that noncitizens can be found ineligible for entry to the United States if the government “knows or has reason to believe” that the foreigner “is or has been a knowing aider, abettor, assister, conspirator or colluder with others in the illicit trafficking” of illegal drugs. The law also allows the State Department to cancel the visas of relatives of a sanctioned official who may have benefited from their illicit gains.

One U.S. official said that while the visa withdrawals might send a powerful signal of the United States’ new willingness to challenge Mexican corruption, they could also stir new conflict between the two governments.

“We should be using all the resources of the government to go after these people,” the official said, referring to corrupt Mexican officials. “But the bigger question is: Does this work with President Sheinbaum? Are you going to lose an opportunity now with a Mexican government that has been very compliant on the drug front?”

A former Mexican ambassador to Washington, Arturo Sarukhaan, said further visa actions against prominent figures in Sheinbaum’s party would make it hard for her to continue claiming a “good” relationship with the United States despite Trump’s often openly confrontational tone.

“But at the same time,” Sarukhaan added, “it gives her — a nationalistic president with a very chauvinistic party behind her — a perfect excuse to say that everything bad that’s happening in Mexico with the economy and everything else is because of U.S. imperialism.”

López Obrador, who came to power in 2018, had promised to fight corruption as never before. Instead, he presided over an administration that denied having any corruption problem in its own ranks even as journalists produced report after report that officials close to the president and even his own sons were engaged in profiteering and graft.

Sheinbaum has struck a different tone. In a message to a Morena party congress on May 4, she warned the faithful about the dangers of cronyism, nepotism and corruption.

“All members of Morena should conduct themselves with honesty, humility and simplicity,” she said. “There cannot be any collusion with crime — whether organized or white collar.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Tim Golden.

“The disappearance of Miguel Ángel Anaya not only underscores the terrifying dangers Mexican reporters continue to face on a daily basis, but is also a stark reminder that the Mexican government continues to allow journalists to be attacked with impunity,” said CPJ’s Mexico Representative Jan-Albert Hootsen. “Mexican authorities must do everything in their power to locate Anaya, return him safely to his family, and ascertain whether his disappearance was related to his work as a reporter.”

Anaya was last seen on April 13 in Pánuco, a town in the eastern Mexican state of Veracruz, but was not reported missing until April 18. The disappearance was confirmed on April 19 by the Veracruz State Commission for Attention to and Protection of Journalists (CEAPP), an autonomous agency of the state government.

Pánuco Online, a news page on Facebook with more than 25,000 followers, covers a wide range of topics, including local politics and crime and violence in the region.

On February 28, Anaya had received threats from unknown individuals at his residence, according to a video published on the Facebook page. According to the video, three men visited his residence in Pánuco saying they had “a message from the mayor,” apparently referring to Pánuco Mayor Óscar Guzmán. Anaya then called the police, and the men, who have not been identified, left the scene when a patrol car approached the residence.

Anaya commented in the video that the threat may have been related to his coverage of a protest two days prior of inhabitants of Pánuco demanding the closure of a local garbage dump.

CPJ was unable to find contact information for Anaya’s family. Several calls to the Pánuco mayor’s office and local police department went unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has found U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who fatally beat Mexican father Anastasio Hernández Rojas responsible for acts of torture. It’s the first time the independent commission, which investigates extrajudicial killings and human rights violations, has issued such findings against a U.S. law enforcement agency. In 2010, Rojas was crossing the southern border in an attempt to return to San Diego, where he’d lived for 25 years, to reunite with his wife and five children after being deported. He was stopped by border agents, who brutally beat and tasered him while he was handcuffed, until Rojas died from heart failure. His death was later ruled a homicide.

This comes as President Trump’s nominee to head Customs and Border Protection, Rodney Scott, is accused of obstructing the criminal probe into Rojas’s killing.

The decision “exposes the unchecked powers of policing in the United States and holds the United States accountable for what is one of the worst violations in human rights, which is the taking of a life,” says Andrea Guerrero, executive director of Alliance San Diego.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Dear Xenophobic America,

On November 14, 2024, I “confessed” that my late Mexican immigrant mother, Carmen Mejía Huerta, “stole” White American jobs. My mother’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” consisted of working as a domestic worker (doméstica)for over four decades, “stealing jobs” from White American women. These are the same gendered jobs that millions of White women discarded and outsourced during the second half of the 20^th Century (to the present) to pursue leisure and employment opportunities.

Like my mother, my late Mexican immigrant father, Salomón Chávez Huerta, participated in “criminal behavior” in the American workplace, “taking away jobs” from White American men. His first “American job heist” occurred during the 1960s, as a guest worker for the Bracero Program (or Mexican Farm Labor Program). As I documented in a past essay, “The day my Mexican father met César Chávez,” the “…Bracero Program represented a guest worker program between the United States and Mexico. From 1942 to 1964, the Mexican government exported an estimated 4.6 million Mexicans to meet this country’s labor shortage not only in the agricultural fields during two major wars (WWII and Korean War), but also in the railroad sector.”

While invited as a “guest” during a critical economic time in American history, my father and millions of his paisanosexperienced exploitation and humiliation in the workplace. Instead of being honored as essential farm workers (campesinos), they were treated more like animals—not that animals, as non-humans, should be abused or neglected. At the Mexican and U.S. processing centers for this bi-national program, government officials forced the Mexican men from the countryside to strip naked in large groups without privacy. The immoral officials sprayed the prospective braceros with the pesticide DDT.  DDT causes cancer, among other illnesses.

After suffering from this traumatizing and humiliating experience, my father rarely spoke about it. Once working on the agricultural fields, the exposure to toxic chemicals continued for my father and his paisanos, as the immoral farmers sprayed their agricultural fields with pesticides linked to cancer and other illnesses. These are the same pesticides that the United Farm Workers (UFW) fought against for many years.

From 1975 to 1985, my father “stole” another American job, when he worked as a janitor in a manufacturing factory. The factory produced chrome wheels for automobiles.  For a decade, my father was exposed to high levels of hexavalent chromium, as part of the chrome-plating process. Like DDT and other pesticides, hexavalent chromium causes cancer and other illnesses.  One day, a young White foreman ordered my father to work closer to the furnaces.  Instead of exposing himself to more heat and toxic chemicals, he quit. Like in the 1960s, when he worked as a farm worker, my father experienced toxic exposure and workplace abuse at the factory while never exceeding the federal minimum wage!

Racial capitalism broke my father’s work spirit.

Defeated, he sporadically worked as a day laborer (jornalero) into his early sixties.

On March 9, 1996, my father died—on his 66^th birthday—of cancer.

Racial capitalism killed my father.

As I critically reflect on my father’s tragic death, I don’t even need to apply my rigorous social science training from UC Berkeley to link my father’s exposure to carcinogens—at high levels for many years—to his early death.

If the xenophobic lords and complicit enablers want me to “return” the earned meager wages by my late immigrant parents, while toiling in discarded American jobs, they must perform a miracle.

Return my Mexican parents from the dead—if only for one day—so I can tell them, individually, what I failed miserably as their proud son to express:

“I love you.”

The post My Immigrant Father “Stole” American Jobs: Another “Confession” from a Child of Mexican Immigrants appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Alvaro Huerta.

On Friday, March 28, the Facebook page “Noticias Chiapas al ROJO” published the names of 17 journalists active in Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala, and accused them, without evidence, of working for the alleged leader of a local gang.

“It is deeply concerning that alleged criminals use social media to smear journalists, placing their lives at risk,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico Representative. “Mexican authorities must provide protection to reporters implicated by this Facebook page and find those responsible and bring them to justice.”

Two Tapachula journalists who spoke to CPJ by phone on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisal, believe Noticias Chiapas al ROJO was created by a criminal gang to spread disinformation against rivals, authorities and journalists.

Social media profiles posing as legitimate news outlets to spread disinformation is common practice in Mexico, according to numerous journalists and government officials CPJ has spoken with over the past several years.

This places journalists at an immediate risk of being targeted by gangs; in 2022, Tijuana photographer Margarito Martínez was killed after being targeted by similar social media pages.

CPJ attempted to contact Facebook via email for comment but did not receive a reply. The offices of the Chiapas state prosecutor and Chiapas governor Eduardo Ramírez did not respond to calls by CPJ for comment. 

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which coordinates protection of reporters at risk, told CPJ on Friday, March 28, that his agency was in the process of evaluating the risk facing reporters named by the Facebook page. He asked not to be identified by name, as he is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Zavala, founder and editor of the Facebook-based news outlet El Silaoense MX, and another man were shot by two unknown assailants on a motorcycle while driving along a highway in the central Mexican city of Silao, Silao authorities said. The killers’ motive is unknown.

“The shocking killing of Kristian Zavala is the third fatal attack on journalists in Mexico this year, cementing its catastrophic record as the deadliest nation in the Western Hemisphere for the press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “These killings are fueled by impunity, which Mexican authorities must do much more to root out.”

Zavala was enrolled in a protection program overseen by the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, a federal government agency that has come under criticism for not offering sufficient safeguards.

Zavala, who covered local politics and security, requested government protection in 2021 after receiving threats, Mexican media reported. CPJ was unable to confirm whether the 28-year-old journalist was still under state protection at the time of his death.

The State Attorney General’s Office is investigating the killing.

Mexico has long been one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists and ranked fourth on CPJ’s 2024 Global Impunity Index, which measures where murderers of journalists are most likely to go free.

In January, reporter Calletano de Jesús Guerrero and editor Alejandro Gallegos León were also killed.

A 2024 report by CPJ and Amnesty International found that Mexico’s Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists consistently failed to protect the press.

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

A report by Turkish public broadcaster TRT World showed one such image of “handcuffed” Indian immigrants being escorted to US military aircraft. (Archive) Delhi-based media outlet The Daily Guardian also used the same image in its report on Indians’ deportation from the US. (Archive)

Meanwhile, Congress leader Pawan Khera also issued a statement that photos showed Indian immigrants handcuffed. “Looking at the pictures of Indians getting handcuffed and humiliated while being deported from the US saddens me as an Indian…” he wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Khera’s initial post had four images, apparently of Indian migrants, showing their wrists and feet in shackles. Khera later edited the post and removed the images. Below are screenshots. (Archives 1, 2)

Fact Check

Alt News found that the image showing handcuffed immigrants in TRT World’s report and the image on the top right in Khera’s post actually shows Guatemalans, not Indians. These images were shared by news agency Associated Press in a report dated February 1.

According to the AP report, a US Air Force jet deported 80 migrants with their writsts and ankles cuffed to Guatemala on Thursday, January 30. The caption of the widely shared image says migrants with face masks and shackles on their hands and feet sit on a military aircraft at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas awaiting deportation.

A reverse image search of the second of the four photos in Khera’s post — showing masked migrants with their hands cuffed behind their back walking in a line led — us to a video shared on X on January 30. The image is a key frame in this video which, according to the caption, shows migrants being deported to Mexico. A location stamp in the video mentions Hidalgo, Texas.

Border patrol walking them right back in to Mexico.

(Repost ) pic.twitter.com/rRQ7JcifDr

— Viral News NYC (@ViralNewsNYC) January 30, 2025

Taking cue from this, we ran a keyword search and found a compilation of photos by Reuters showing scenes from the frontlines of the immigration crackdown from January 29. One of the pictures in the compilation showed migrants being escorted across the Hidalgo international border bridge in McAllen, Texas. The same migrants can be seen in the Reuters compilation, the video on X uploaded on January and in Khera’s now-edited post. Below is a comparison.

We were also able to locate the third image shared by Khera in the same Reuters picture compilation. The January 23 photo shows detained migrants waiting to take off on a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III removal flight at the Tucson International Airport in Tucson, Arizona. Again, this image was taken two weeks before Indians were deported.

Alt News was also able to verify the last image used in Khera’s post. This is one of the key frames of a video shared by the US Homeland Security on X on January 28. “In the first week of the Trump Administration, we have fulfilled President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport violent criminals illegally in the country,” the post said.

Also, while some news reports claim that nearly 200 Indians were deported, Punjab minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal, who looks into affairs of overseas Indians, put the number at 104.

Mirror Now airs clips of deportation

Indian news outlet Mirror Now aired clips claiming it showed Indians being deported. Note that these videos featured scenes from the airport and US officials escorting a line of immigrants but immigrants were not seen handcuffed here. (Archive)

#BreakingNews: US military aircraft carrying 205 deported Indians set to arrive in Amritsar today afternoon @kaur_poviet brings in more details | @NivedhanaPrabhu pic.twitter.com/d1Yzo5HE0S

— Mirror Now (@MirrorNow) February 5, 2025

Fact Check

The clips in Mirror Now’s broadcast show migrants deported from the United States arriving in Guatemala; these are not related to Indians’ deportation. The clips were published by AP in a report on January 25.

Below are comparisons of keyframes from Mirror Now’s reportage and Associated Press’s video.

One can see the words ‘Instituto Guatemalteco de Migración’ on a hoarding. This translates to Guatemalan Institute of Migration. The words ‘Guatemala, C.A.’, can also be seen.

Congress spokesperson condemns ‘humiliation’ faced by Indian migrants

Congress spokesperson Shama Mohamed also shared an image showing handcuffed immigrants being lined up and escorted into an aircraft. “Why can’t we protest against the US for this humiliation and for treating Indians as criminals?” she wrote on X. (Archive)

Another X account, @IndianTrendX, also shared a similar image claiming Indians were being deported from the US under Trump’s administration. “In the first week of the Trump Administration, we have fulfilled President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport violent criminals illegally in the country,” the post, dated January 28, said. (Archive)

Fact Check

Alt News found that the images shared by the INC spokesperson and in the X post are not of Indians. Both images were originally shared on X by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on January 25 — at least 11 days before the deportation to Amritsar.

Deportation flights have begun.

President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world: if you illegally enter the United States of America, you will face severe consequences. pic.twitter.com/CTlG8MRcY1

— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) January 24, 2025

The images were also used in the video shared by the US Homeland Security on X. The post, dated January 28, claimed that in just a week, US law enforcement officials had “removed and returned 7,300 illegal aliens”.

In the first week of the Trump Administration, we have fulfilled President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport violent criminals illegally in the country. In one week, law enforcement officials have removed and returned 7,300 illegal aliens. pic.twitter.com/JKZYMD0f00

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 28, 2025

Another image claiming to showcase deportation of Indian migrants viral

A similar image was used by Punjab-based news outlet The Tribune in their report on Indians’ deportation. (Archive)

Fact Check

A reverse image search of the photo used in The Tribune piece led us to a Reuters report on the cost of the these deportations using military aircraft where the same image has been used. The picture, a handout by the US Department of Defense, was taken on January 23 at Fort Bliss, Texas and shows US Customs and Border Protection security agents guiding detained migrants to board a the US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III aircraft.

The image is from two weeks before Indian migrants were deported.

Alt News’s fact-check report has verified several unrelated images and clips being circulated with claims that these are Indians but actually show migrants of other nationalities being deported. However, this does not imply that Indian deportees did not face the same conditions. On Thursday, February 6, The Indian Express reported that Indians illegally living there were indeed sent back to India handcuffed and chained. The report, citing one of the deportees, said that Indians were shackled for 40 hours on the aircraft, “not allowed to move an inch,” were allowed to “drag” themselves to the washroom after repeated requests. The official Instagram handle of the US Border Patrol also released visuals of the deportation wherein the shackled Indian immigrants can be seen entering the aircraft. “USBP and partners successfully returned illegal aliens to India, marking the farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”, reads the caption of the video.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by U.S. Border Patrol (@borderpatrol)

Also, it is important to mention here that this is not the first time the US has deported Indian migrants but never before have military aircraft been deployed for doing so.

The post Trump’s Immigration Crackdown: Images of handcuffed Guatemalan, Mexican immigrants shared as Indian deportees appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

“The killing of Alejandro Gallegos comes weeks after the killing of journalist Calletano de Jesús Guerrero, underscoring the ongoing crisis violence and impunity journalists in Mexico face,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Unless Mexican authorities take all appropriate steps to find Gallegos’ attackers, president Claudia Sheinbaum’s commitment to protecting press freedom continue to ring hollow.”

Gallegos, 51, was the editor of La Voz del Pueblo, a news website based on Facebook, according to newsreports. He also worked as a teacher at the Alfa y Omega Presbyterian University in Tabasco and as a lawyer, they added. 

La Voz del Pueblo mostly publishes short news stories and videos on regional politics in Tabasco. Despite news reports of a recent spike in criminal violence in the state, the website did not extensively cover that topic. Its recent articles on politics mostly cover press events in a neutral tone.

It is unclear whether Gallegos had received threats. CPJ was unable to find contact information for his family. Messages to La Voz del Pueblo via Facebook and calls to the Alfa y Omega University for comment were not immediately answered.

The Tabasco state prosecutor’s office (FGE) said in a statement released on X on January 25 that it opened an investigation, without providing further details. Several phone calls by CPJ to the FGE to request comment were not answered.

The Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, a federal government agency that provides protective measures to the press, said in a January 25 statement on X that Gallegos was not incorporated in a federally sanctioned protection program.

On January 29, Tabasco governor Javier May said on X that a suspect in the case had been arrested. He did not provide further details. Several calls by CPJ to the governor’s office were not answered. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“The brutal killing of Calletano de Jesús Guerrero, despite being under the protection of the federal government, underscores the urgency of Mexican authorities’ strengthening its capacity to protect reporters at risk,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “If the state continues to fail in its duty to protect the press, there will be no one left to shine light in the dark and report the news. Impunity in these crimes must end, and authorities must hold the killers to account.”

Guerrero, deputy editor of Facebook-based news outlet Global Mexico, regularly published news stories about crime, violence, and politics in México state. 

The Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, a government agency that provides protective measures to journalists, said in a January 18 statement on social media platform X that the most recent threat against Guerrero was on January 13, 2024, when unidentified men threatened him at his residence because of his reporting. 

A mechanism official declined to speak via messaging app as they were not authorized to comment publicly on the case.

Police recovered two 9mm bullet casings at the scene of the crime, according to a report by news website Fuerza Informativa Azteca, which added that the police had begun an investigation. Several calls by CPJ to the Estado de México state prosecutor’s office to request comment were unanswered.

Mexico has long been one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists and ranked seventh on CPJ’s 2023 Global Impunity Index, which measures where murderers of journalists are most likely to go free. Mexico has been on the index every year since its inception.

A joint report by CPJ and Amnesty International showed in 2024 that the country consistently fails in its efforts to provide state-sanctioned protection to members of the press.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Ramírez, an entertainment reporter for the privately owned Hechos newspaper, was the second Mexican journalist killed in less than 24 hours following Tuesday’s shooting of Mauricio Cruz Solís. The killings occurred during the first month of Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration.

“The brutal killing of Paty Bunbury is especially shocking, as it comes less than a day after her colleague Mauricio Cruz was killed,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “The killings demonstrate the urgent need for President Sheinbaum to take steps to protect the press from violence.” 

According to a statement by the Colima state prosecutor’s office (FGE), Ramírez was shot by a single, unidentified individual at around 2 p.m. in the eatery she runs in Colima’s state capital as a side job to her work as a journalist. 

The FGE has not stated whether they’re investigating whether her reporting was a possible motive and did not answer several telephone calls for comment by CPJ. 

Mario Alberto Gaitán, the vice president of local journalists’ association Periodistas Colimenses, told CPJ via telephone that Ramírez did not cover politics, crime, or security and had not reported having received threats.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

“The brutal and brazen killing of journalist Mauricio Cruz Solís is the first such deadly attack during the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum and underscores the ongoing violence and impunity the Mexican press faces every day,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico Representative. “Mexican authorities must immediately conduct a credible investigation into this killing. If Mexican authorities allow this crime to go unpunished, it will be a sad reminder that a change of government has not brought safety for the nation’s press.”

The Michoacán state prosecutor’s office (FGE) posted a Tuesday statement on the social media site X saying they have launched an investigation.

Cruz, 25, was a news anchor for broadcaster Radiorama Michoacán and founder of news website Minuto x Minuto. He reported on general news, including politics and security, according to his friend and colleague, Julio César Aguirre, who spoke with CPJ. Aguirre said he was unaware of any threats to Cruz’s life.

An official for the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, a federal agency, told CPJ via messaging app on October 29 that the agency had not registered any threats against Cruz or assigned him any security measures. They spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity, as they are not allowed to speak publicly on the matter.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

Democracy Now! co-host Juan González has co-authored a major new report for the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago titled “Fuerza Mexicana: The Past, Present, and Power of Mexicans in Chicagoland,” which takes a deep look into Chicago’s Mexican community. Constituting one-fifth of the city’s population, Chicago’s Mexican residents are significant contributors to the area’s economy, but the workforce is disproportionately concentrated in some of the most dangerous, difficult, low-paying jobs. “The character of the Chicago working class has dramatically changed and is heavily Mexican,” says González. He adds that “Mexican migration saved Chicago” from the kind of post-industrial decline plaguing other cities like Detroit, Indianapolis and Cleveland.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Grajales, editor of news website Villaflores.com.mx, was shot multiple times by unidentified gunmen who broke into his residence in Villaflores, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, just after midnight on August 21, according to news reports and a statement by the Chiapas state prosecutor (FGE).  Grajales was taken to a hospital where he is in stable condition, according to the statement.

“Even in a country plagued by violence and impunity, the attack against Ariel Grajales is shocking in its brutality,” said CPJ’s Mexico Representative Jan-Albert Hootsen. “Authorities in Chiapas must take all the appropriate steps to help him secure his family’s safety and hold all those responsible to account.”

Grajales is a news reporter with more than 30 years of experience, according to Gabriela Coutiño, a Chiapas-based journalist and longtime friend of Grajales’, who spoke with CPJ on August 21 after the shooting.

Grajales’ Villafores.com.mx reports mostly local news, including local politics and crime and security in the area. Hours before the attack, the journalist posted a short message on his Facebook page about businesses in the area being extorted by criminal gangs.

The FGE said in its statement that it has opened an investigation into Grajales’ shooting but on a possible motive. Several calls to the FGE by CPJ went unanswered.

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which offers federally sanctioned protection to journalists, told CPJ via WhatsApp on August 21 that the office is working to provide Grajales and his family with protection. The spokesperson asked to remain anonymous as they are not authorized to comment.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

“Mexican authorities must act immediately to find and arrest the killers of Alejandro Martínez Noguez, whose death underscores the dangers journalists face in the city of Celaya and its environs,” said CPJ Mexico Representative Jan-Albert Hootsen. “His shooting while under police protection is a shocking example of the dangers facing journalists trying to keep the Mexican public informed about what is happening in their country.”

Martínez, who went by the nickname “El Hijo del Llanero Solitito”  (The Son of the Lone Ranger) and ran a popular Facebook page covering crime in Celaya – an area known for violent turf wars between drug gangs and where several reporters have been killed in the past five years – had been assigned police guards after a previous attempt on his life. 

Mexico has long been one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists and, as a joint report by CPJ and Amnesty International showed earlier this year, consistently fails in its efforts to provide state-sanctioned protection to members of the press.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The body of Morales, founder and editor of the Facebook-based news site Realidades, was found on the side of a highway in southern Chiapas state on June 28, according to the state prosecutor’s office, which has opened a murder investigation. El Universal newspaper reported that Morales’ hands were tied and his face was taped while La Silla Rota news site said that he had been shot. Neither named their sources.

“The brutal murder of Víctor Morales is a sad reminder of the ongoing violence and impunity crisis journalists in Mexico are facing and underscores the urgent need for President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum to prioritize press safety when she takes office in October,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico Representative. “Mexican authorities must do everything in their power to apprehend those responsible for this latest killing and establish the motive.”

The Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which coordinates protection for reporters at risk, was not aware of any threats against Morales, one of its officials told CPJ on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to comment publicly.

A June 26 report on Realidades said that the deployment of thousands of soldiers and police officers to Chiapas had failed to stem violence related to turf wars between criminal gangs.

CPJ’s calls to the state prosecutor’s office requesting comment were not answered.

Mexico ranked seventh on CPJ’s latest Global Impunity Index, which measures where murderers of journalists are most likely to go free. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

With the apology, issued on Monday in Oaxaca’s state capital of Oaxaca de Juárez, both authorities acknowledged “errors and omissions” made by public officials after Sánchez entered into a federally sanctioned protection program, which created circumstances that increased risks to his life.

“We welcome that the Mexican authorities apologized to Gustavo Sánchez’s family and acknowledged that his death could have been prevented had the state acted decisively and provided him with adequate protection, as he had been promised,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “An apology, however, can only be the first step in a process that must lead to not only appropriate reparation of damages to Gustavo Sánchez’s family, but also the sweeping changes necessary to make the state of Oaxaca and Mexico safer for journalists. Never again must the Mexican state be complicit in a journalist’s death, whether it be the perpetrator or by omission.”

Sánchez, a crime and politics reporter, was enrolled in the protection program after surviving an attempt on his life in July 2020, when unidentified gunmen shot him near Morro Mazatán, according to news reports and video that Sánchez recorded at the time. 

The public apology was issued in a solemn ceremony in the state governmental palace in Oaxaca de Juárez at noon on Monday, with Sánchez’s widow Marilú Zarate, state and federal officials, journalists and representatives of press freedom groups, including CPJ, in attendance. It took place three years to the day after Sánchez, a reporter in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region in southern Oaxaca, was shot by unidentified attackers in his home town of Morro Mazatán.

The legal counsel to Oaxaca Governor Salomón Jara acknowledged that the state had acted slowly to provide Sánchez with police protection, even though this has been agreed upon with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, and that state authorities had “minimized” threats against his life.

Tobyanne Ledesma, the head of the Federal Mechanism, which is overseen by the federal government, acknowledged that her institution had also made errors in coordinating safety measures for Sánchez with the Oaxaca state government. She announced a number of steps her institution had taken to prevent the same from happening again, including improved risk evaluation methodologies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

In a historic election, Claudia Sheinbaum has become the first woman elected president of Mexico. Sheinbaum is a climate scientist, former mayor of Mexico City and close ally of sitting president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. “She owes a lot to women’s movements in Mexico,” says Laura Carlsen, director of MIRA: Feminisms and Democracies. “This is more than a symbolic victory. What it means is that there’s an example for younger women that women can be leaders.” Carlsen says feminist movements are hopeful Sheinbaum’s administration will take on Mexico’s high rates of gender-based violence and femicide. Meanwhile, to the north, President Biden is signing an executive order today that would temporarily shut down the U.S.-Mexico border after asylum requests made by migrants surpass 2,500 a day, and Mexico’s cooperation will be key in enforcing the measure.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Unknown individuals driving a red truck passed by the residence of Amaro, founder and editor of Tlaxcala state-based news website La Prensa de Tlaxcala, and yelled death threats at the reporter’s bodyguards stationed at the front gate at approximately 7 p.m. on Monday, May 20 in the city of Apizaco, in the central Mexican state of Tlaxcala, Amaro told CPJ.

“They told the bodyguards that they were going to ‘kill us all,’ after which they drove away,” Amaro told CPJ, adding that they drove by again shortly after and repeated the threats. “The bodyguards told me that they may have been intoxicated.”

Amaro is currently enrolled in a protection program sanctioned by the federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists after receiving numerous threats over the past years.

“It is deeply concerning that reporter Alberto Amaro Jordán continues to receive brazen death threats, even as he is under the protection of the Mexican government. These threats are a clear sign of the violence that continues to plague the Mexican press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “CPJ calls on Mexican authorities to investigate the threats Amaro and his family face and to strengthen the safety measures before this case becomes yet another footnote in Mexico’s abysmal track record of keeping journalists safe.”

Amaro told CPJ he believed it was possible the threats were related to a May 15 reporting trip he took to the nearby municipality of Ocotlán with human rights activist Viridiana Baena Leyva. Baena is also a member of Madres Buscadoras (Searching Mothers), a national network searching for missing family members and demanding the Mexican federal government address the widely reported forced disappearance of nearly 100,000 people.

Amaro and Baena traveled to an empty lot in Ocotlán to investigate rumors of clandestine graves. Upon arrival, the pair were immediately watched by several people in the area; Amaro told CPJ that he perceived the observation as threatening. When they left the area, a state police car followed them for more than 10 miles.

Amaro added that on May 20, the same day he received the threats, Tlaxcala police arrested a former policeman and two women in Ocotlán on suspicion of having been involved in the disappearance of an Uber driver in the area. The reporter said the arrest may be related to the threats he received, considering the timing and that he and Baena were followed after visiting Ocotlán.  

CPJ’s several telephone calls to the office of the Tlaxcala State Prosecutor’s Office on May 21 and May 22 were not answered.

An official of the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists who asked for anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly told CPJ that the agency was made aware of the threats and is currently investigating, adding that Amaro was already enrolled in “one of the strongest protection schedules.”

The Mexican federal government created the mechanism in 2012 after years of pressure from journalists and civil society organizations to address the constant threats and attacks against defenders and media workers. In March 2024, CPJ noted that eight journalists had been killed while enrolled in the mechanism in the last seven years and urgently called for the government to strengthen and reform the institution.

Amaro detailed the threats, attacks, and harassment that he has been subjected to — including threats by three men who claimed to be members of one of Mexico’s most prominent drug trafficking gangs, the Sinaloa cartel, in a joint report published by CPJ and Amnesty International in March 2024. In March 2021, a mayor of a nearby municipality attempted to drive Amaro off the road.

Mexico remains one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists. CPJ has found that the high levels of violence against journalists can be attributed in part to the failure of state and federal authorities to make the environment safer for reporters or even take crimes against the press seriously.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Photograph Source: 龙2000 – CC0

While it may appear to be desirable that former Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum win the presidential election to avoid the threat to international solidarity that a return of the right (this time under Xóchitl Gálvez, who was a member of Vicente Fox’s cabinet) forebodes, Sheinbaum offers little for women, for the left, for the environment, or for the poor and working class people who are the overwhelming majority in Mexico:

+ Sheinbaum has, since initiating her presidential campaign, made constant reference to herself as a symbol for women leaders. But, as the feminist website lacaderadeeva.com (Eve’s hip) reports, her relationship with women’s protests has been cynical at best. There are demonstrations, each one bigger than the previous year’s, every March 8–International Women’s Day—in Mexican Cities. In Mexico and other parts of Latin America, the marches have recently focused on violence against women, including police violence. And in the fall of 2019, after an under-aged woman in the Mexico City district of Azcapotzalco was raped by several police officers, an especially militant march featured vandalism, controlled burnings, the partial burning of a police station in the Zona Rosa, and the chant “La policía no nos cuida; nosotras nos cuidamos”—the police don’t take care of us; women take care of each other—-the tone of women’s marches became progressively less pacifist. Sheinbaum on this occasion sent women police to be cannon fodder and to protect the sacred police station from the feminist hordes. When a few of the women cops got pushed, the then-mayor debuted what would become her disingenuous refrain in these situations: “I can’t believe women are attacking other women!”

+ On the eve of the 2022 International Women’s Day march, Sheinbaum, president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (her mentor), and their functionaries whipped out sensationalist warnings that they must have learned from the police who trained other police in “Seattle tactics” in the late nineties in the U.S.: the president called for the protest to be peaceful and said he had reports that women were bringing Molotov cocktails to the march. Martí Batres, then the top cabinet official in Sheinbaum’s government, now substitute mayor, displayed “rockets” confiscated by the police which turned out to be benign fireworks that merely shoot colors. Sheinbaum then announced that “the police will not repress; they will merely encapsule” (kettle or contain) groups within the march that seem intent on violence.  As La Cadera de Eva put it: “Though Sheinbaum has tried to play the gender card as a political strategy, people have not forgotten that during all her term, she had a complicated relationship with the feminist movement. In every march, organized women were repressed with pepper gas, encapsulated, and stigmatized.”

+ As environment secretary to then-mayor López Obrador, she promoted and carried out the construction of an upper level of the biggest highway in the city with no environmental mitigation efforts: no mass transit lanes, no carpool lanes, no bike lanes.

+ In her five years as mayor, air pollution increased and, though 70 percent of this is caused by cars while only 20 percent of the people own cars, she and her group have refused to implement effective restrictions on driving.

+ As her police chief, Sheinbaum named Omar García Harfuch, a former federal police head in Guerrero, the state where the 43 students from the teacher’s college in Tixtla (Ayotzinapa) disappeared. Sheinbaum’s appointee Harfuch has tried to avoid responsibility by saying that just days before he had been transferred to another state. However, he was still the person designated to receive reports and new evidence indicates that he was present at a meeting shortly after the atrocity at which state, local, and federal officials planned a cover-up. Sheinbaum promoted his improvised candidacy for mayor. When that failed she supported him for senator, and also says she plans to name him to a federal law enforcement post and have him serve a day in the senate (in order to have immunity from prosecution?) and then take a leave of absence.

+ When Hugo López-Gatell, the federal coordinator of anti-Covid efforts, asked that Mexico City return to more restrictions tending toward a new closure of businesses in the city in December, 2020, when cases were rising steeply, and this only after procrastinating for several crucial weeks to avoid hurting Christmas season sales, Sheinbaum took a more Trumpish position, claiming that the city was being “punished” because better reporting made it look like the city had more cases. She also arranged, very early on, for bar owners to pretend to be restauranteurs. Just like in New York, except that more bars in Mexico City are mob-owned and fewer have something called a kitchen.

So much for the “left” candidate. Three center and right parties have been in coalition since shortly after López Obrador’s victory.  Their candidate Xóchitl Gálvez started out strong when her humorous way of responding to attacks from López Obrador propelled her in the polls. This allowed her to project herself as non-partisan, different from the corrupt or conservative politicians who dominate in the parties that comprise her coalition. She has since made more obvious her links to two of Mexico’s worst former presidents, Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón. Like them, she is a proponent of iron-fist anti-crime policies which led to tens of thousands of deaths during Calderón’s presidency.

While Sheinbaum “rested” waiting for the official campaign season to start, she took a tour of Europe—Spain and Italy, anyway—to visit with Calderón, the pope, the king of Spain, and leaders of the neo-fascist, pro-Franco right-wing of Spain.

Given this pessimistic panorama for electoral politics, it was inevitable that something like the U.S. campaigns in favor of writing in “ceasefire” or “uncommitted” would take hold in Mexico. On Sunday, April 14, parents of the 43 missing education students and organizations in the Asamblea Nacional Popular that share the opinion that López Obrador and his team (including, of course, Sheinbaum and Harfuch) have done nothing in the way of bringing justice and have insulted the families of the students and the human rights groups that work with them made an announcement: They are calling for a boycott of the election. Their statement reads in part:

 “Our struggle continues; we will expand the protests incorporating other sectors, including teachers, campesinos, and indigenous people…We cannot allow the system of political parties to carry out its electoral feast with vacuous discourses when the parents of the 43 suffer the pain of not knowing where their sons are…It is inconceivable that among the 100 campaign points of the candidate of the Morena Party (Claudia Sheinbaum) there is not a single mention of the case of Ayotzinapa. We are not members of nor obedient to any political party.”

This article originally appeared in Southside Pride of Minneapolis.

The post Random Notes About the Mexican Election appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Johnny Hazard.

Figueroa was abducted by gunmen on the morning of April 26 after dropping his daughters off at school in Cuernavaca, about 50 miles south of Mexico City, according to news reports.

Figueroa’s unidentified captors contacted his wife on at least three occasions and demanded a ransom in exchange for his release. His wife handed over an undisclosed sum later that day, but the journalist was found dead that evening inside his vehicle in Coajomulco, north of Morelos’ state capital of Cuernavaca, some 25 miles south of Mexico City.

“With the shocking killing of Roberto Carlos Figueroa, whose abduction occurred in broad daylight, Mexico continues a disturbing pattern of deadly violence against journalists, with a vast majority of cases committed with impunity,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities must immediately take all appropriate steps to bring Figueroa’s captors to justice, and investigate the motive behind his killing.”

Figueroa, 40, was a trained biologist and former government official who moved into journalism and online content creation after the state and general elections of 2018, Morelos-based journalist José Montes told CPJ by phone on Thursday. Montes and Figueroa became friends after the former was the latter’s supervisor when they worked in the Morelos state government.

Figueroa was based out of Cuernavaca and was the founder and editor of Acá en el Show, a satirical and critical news outlet that publishes on Facebook.. Figueroa posted news articles and commentary on local politics, as well as satirical and humorous videos critical of local politicians, including Morelos Governor Cuauhtémoc Blanco.

“He [Figueroa] was very sharp in his criticism of politicians,” Montes told CPJ.

On the day of his abduction and killing, Figueroa posted a short video on Acá en el Show, announcing that he had information on corruption involving candidates for the upcoming June 2 state and federal elections.  The post appeared to be an announcement that he would release the information soon, though a date was not given.

Montes told CPJ that he was not aware of any threats against Figueroa’s life, and the journalist did not seem unusually worried or stressed in the days before his death. However, Montes noted that there were two break-ins in Figueroa’s office in November and December of last year, but nothing was stolen.

On April 26, an official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists—which operates out of Mexico City under the auspices of the federal government and provides state-sanctioned protection to journalists and rights defenders at risk—told CPJ via messaging app that the office had no prior knowledge of any threats against Figueroa’s life. The official asked CPJ to remain anonymous, as they were not authorized to comment on the matter.

In a press conference held on April 29, Morelos state prosecutor Uriel Carmona Gándara told journalists that Figuero’s death is possibly linked to his work as a reporter. He did not provide further details. Several phone calls by CPJ to the prosecutor’s office to request further comment were not answered.

Mexico is the one of the most dangerous  countries for journalists in the Western Hemisphere, according to CPJ research.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Photograph Source: EneasMx – CC BY-SA 4.0

If outgoing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has accomplished anything during his five-year-plus term, it could be said that he’s laid down the third rail of Mexican politics.  

Focusing on AMLO’s Maya Train, the new tourism megaproject cutting through the country’s southeastern jungles, or the President’s plan to revive the national passenger train service dismantled with the onset of the old North American Free Trade Agreement, foreign media train talk of Mexico has tended to overlook what could well prove to be AMLO’s most enduring legacy: expanded pensions and other social programs benefiting the working class that are emerging as not only a national consensus but as an institutional reality.   

In a major speech delivered on February 5, the Mexican Constitution Day holiday, AMLO rolled out a list of 20 constitutional and legal reforms for Congress to consider, including reaffirming the right of all Mexicans 65 or older to a pension with annual increases; providing pensions that pay 100 percent of the last salary of retirees who are enrolled in the federal government’s IMSS and ISSTE systems;  assuring economic support for disabled persons and scholarships for low-income students; guaranteeing that the increase in the minimum wage is never below the annual rate of inflation; and providing free health care to all Mexicans.   

“The reforms I proposed seek to establish constitutional rights and strengthen ideas and principles related to humanism, justice, honesty, (government) austerity, and the democracy that we have postulated and brought into practice since the origins of the contemporary movement of national transformation,” AMLO said. 

In addition to giving constitutional protection to an array of existing social programs launched during the López Obrador years, the reform package proposes trimming the number of Congressional representatives and senators, instituting guaranteed prices for farmers, prohibiting GMO corn for human consumption, banning fracking, slashing Supreme Court terms from 15 to 12 years, selecting judges by popular vote, and outlawing animal abuse, among other measures. 

As the Mexican leader recently reiterated, he’s spearheading a peaceful revolution, a “revolution of consciences” that proposes to rescue the progressive spirit of the 1917 Mexican Constitution, which was born from the blood of the 1910 Revolution but eroded in recent decades by neo-liberal reforms propagated by administrations led by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and National Action Party (PAN). 

For AMLO and his supporters, the 20 reforms are at the heart of what they term the Fourth Transformation of Mexico, or the 4T.  

With elections coming up on June 2, AMLO’s opponents criticized the reform proposals as an example of improper presidential interference on behalf of the President’s Morena Party and its presidential candidate, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, who vows to not only continue the 4T but take it to a higher level. 

 Unfazed, AMLO readily acknowledged the election connection, arguing that the people of Mexico have a right to decide their future national project at the ballot box. Yet opposition politicians and pundits are hard-pressed to oppose the reforms in their entirety since many enjoy broad popular support, especially the adult pensions and social programs. Cherry picking is underway. 

Banded together with the minuscule Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in an electoral coalition running Xochitl Galvez for president, the PRI, PAN and PRD nonetheless face political disaster if they openly oppose the social programs. 

Indeed, the PRI even attempted a left pivot in the wake of February 5, declaring that it will do even better on the social front than AMLO’s proposals, proposing for example, that 60 instead of 65 should be the the eligible age for an adult pension.

The governor of the key industrial state of Nuevo Leon, 36-year-old Samuel García of the opposition Citizen Movement party, was asked on national television about the reforms. He told the interviewer he supported at least 15 of the proposed changes, but had concerns over the legal and security components. The coordinators of García’s party in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate were quoted in the Mexican press in mid-February as saying they would likely support 11 of the 20 proposals.   

In short, any Mexican politician in 2024 who’s not willing to take at least a few main stops on the emerging third rail of politics does so at his or her own peril.  

Silvestre Pacheco, an author, activist and political columnist in Guerrero state, detects a big dilemma facing opposition forces like the conservative PAN. “If the opposition is against (AMLO’s constitutional reforms), people will vote against them,” he said in an interview. “If they vote for (reforms), their social base will get rid of them for betraying conservative principles.” 

Boosting AMLO’s popularity and the 4T’s program are social programs, labor rights, economic policies, and public works implemented during the current administration, according to Pacheco. 

The longtime analyst pointed to adult pensions, educational scholarships, minimum wage increases and much more. 

“López Obrador promoted the minimum wage in an important way that surpassed all the ones of the neo-liberal era and nothing (disastrous) happened, even the businessmen agreed,” Pacheco said.  López Obrador punctured the myth of the conservatives’ argument that a minimum wage increase is the origin of inflation.” 

In the countryside, meanwhile, Sembrando la Vida, the federal program that pays growers to plant trees has likewise netted positive benefits for rural sectors of the population, he continued. Overall, Pacheco maintained, the political balance tilts strongly in favor of continuing the current political-economic course with its possible new constitutional guarantees.

“The electorate wil have a big impact on this process. I think there will be big participation, and people will vote for Morena,” Pacheco predicted. “Morena will emerge as the great party of the left.” 

For Pacheco, however, Mexico is “barely at the beginning of a national transformation,” and one that in the long term will require bolder policies like a capital tax to support programs like adult pensions on a firm financial basis. 

“The 4-T is touching everyone. It’s a total phenomenon, a live organism,” said Alejandro Rozado, a Mexican sociologist and psychotherapist based in Guadalajara. “Can anyone stop it? Its like trying to stop a hurricane with an umbrella,” Rozado asserted in a presentation at this year’s Puerto Vallarta’s annual book fair. 

The author of a recent book that delves into the 4-T and AMLO’s role as the leading agent of change, Rozado places López Obrador in the tradition of Mexico’s “non-socialist left,” a political tendency encompassing diverse historical figures including José María Morelos y Pavón, Emiliano Zapata, Francisco Villa, and Lázaro Cárdenas.

For Rozado, the 4-T reforms represent “irreversible” and profound changes that put Mexico on the path of modernization. Rather than by force of arms or popular insurrection, Rozado contended that a transformation is underway in Mexico, first delivered via the massive vote of 2018 that elevated AMLO and Morena to office, and in his view will do so again in 2024 for Claudia Sheinbaum. Poised to become Mexico’s first woman president, Sheinbaum enjoys a comfortable lead in the polls at this time.

“The problem with the right is that it wants to go backwards. This is its big error,” Rozado said. “We have the government but not the power,” he cautioned. “Courts, bosses, media, and banks have it.” 

Not unlike in the U.S.,  Morena’s opposition is hard at work probing and poking the weak points of AMLO’s presidency, with unresolved crime and insecurity matters high on its campaign agenda. 

Arguably, the biggest potential brake on the 4T train is not made in Mexico. As Manuel Pérez Rocha of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies recently wrote in the Mexican daily La Jornada, Mexico is immersed in numerous foreign investor-state disputes arising from government actions to protect the environment, safeguard public health and ensure the supremacy of the Mexican state in the exploitation of and economic rewards from natural resources.  

Pérez Rocha contended that the proposed constitutional reforms banning new open pit minining concessions, outlawing fracking, recuperating the railroads from foreign control, and restoring the Federal Electricity Commission to the driver’s seat of energy production and distribution, likely risk a new round legal challenges from foreign investors due to Mexico’s adherence to multiple free trade agreements. He predicted such an outcome would propel Mexico from the fourth most-sued nation to the most sued in the global investor-state dispute realm. 

In the case of GMO corn, the Biden Administration is defending U.S. agribusiness in its complaint filed under NAFTA’s successor, the US- Mexico-Canada Agreement, against Mexico City’s efforts to halt any use of GMO corn in food products.  

“There are no solitary national solutions in leaving behind neoliberalism, Pérez Rocha asserted, urging collective international action in favor of public interests. “The frameworks of treaties with other countries that grant transnational businesses the most powerful tools to overwhelm us and limit our sovereignty must be confronted.”

Meanwhile, AMLO’s proposed constitutional reforms will be considered-and likely modified- by various Congressional commissons before undergoing full votes expected sometime this year. Organized by the legislative branch, a series of public forums preceding congressional action will be held across the nation between February and April. 

Morena possesses simple majorities in both houses of Congress, but AMLO’s party and its allies in the PT and PVEM parties will need some opposition votes for the constitutional proposals to fly. 

As the clock ticks away on his presidency, López Obrador has just released his long-promised book, Gracias!, which is a mixture of memoir, political philosophy, life coaching, and a treatise of the 4T. For the President, the June 2 elections represent a popular plebiscite that poses a fundamental question for Mexico’s future: “Do you want the transformation to continue or do you want to return to the (politicians) from before, the corrupt ones?”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kent Paterson.

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Almost every weekday at 7 a.m., Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador holds a press conference known in Spanish as “la mañanera,” or, loosely translated, the morning show. He takes questions from reporters, but his purpose is to control the news, recounting his achievements and bashing his enemies, real and perceived — especially those in the media.

Since last week, López Obrador has focused much of his ire on an article we published on Jan. 30 about allegations that drug traffickers contributed $2 million to his first, unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2006. He dismissed the story as “completely false” and “slander.”

The president has been aggressive in attacking the story’s reporter, Tim Golden, calling him “a mercenary in the service” of the Drug Enforcement Administration, a tool of the U.S. State Department and “pawn,” among other things. “As far as I’m concerned, they should give him the prize for slander,” he said of Golden, who has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize.

On Wednesday, López Obrador challenged Golden to come to the National Palace in Mexico City to answer questions about the origins of the story, why we wrote it and the identity of his sources in the United States and Mexico.

Although Golden might enjoy the debate, he won’t be appearing on the morning show. He made extensive efforts to include López Obrador’s views before the piece ran. We contacted the president’s chief spokesperson more than a week before publication and provided a detailed summary of the story’s findings along with a series of questions. After numerous requests, the spokesperson promised a reply, but we never received one.

ProPublica has requested an interview with López Obrador about the story and the questions it raises, and we would speak with him as we would any other head of state — not for an episode of the regular mañanera segment he calls “Who’s Who in the Lies?”

I do think it’s useful to engage the president on the legitimate questions he has posed about why we are doing this reporting and how we went about it.

To recap: Our story, which was based on interviews with current and former officials and a review of government documents, disclosed the existence of a previously secret investigation by the DEA into reported donations to López Obrador’s 2006 presidential campaign by traffickers working with the so-called Sinaloa Cartel.

The case began when a Mexican drug lawyer working as an informant for the DEA reported in 2010 that he had participated in the meeting at which the donations were first negotiated, officials said. He reported having given most of the agreed-on funds to an operative in López Obrador’s 2006 campaign, Mauricio Soto Caballero. The informant then enticed Soto to come in on a small-time cocaine deal. DEA agents arrested Soto in McAllen, Texas, and he agreed to work undercover for the Americans to stay out of federal prison.

Ultimately, three other witnesses, including Soto, confirmed the drug lawyer’s account to the DEA, officials said. To gather more evidence for a possible corruption case, the DEA had Soto surreptitiously record two conversations with the man to whom he said he had given most of the traffickers’ money, Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar, one of López Obrador’s closest aides.

Justice Department prosecutors reviewed the tapes and found them incriminating but not decisive, people familiar with the case said. DEA agents wanted to go forward with a more elaborate sting operation inside Mexico, but DOJ officials rejected that plan in late 2011, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.

The case was closed and, to our knowledge, no further investigation of López Obrador or his inner circle’s possible links to drug traffickers was pursued by U.S. investigators.

(Soto did not respond to our repeated questions about his role in the U.S. investigation, but he denied in recent interviews that he acted as a confidential source or taped his friend and colleague Mollinedo. In an interview, Mollinedo told us he never received donations from drug traffickers, disputed that López Obrador would ever tolerate such corruption and said he knew nothing of any U.S. investigation involving his friend Soto.)

López Obrador was elected president in 2018 after promising a turn away from confrontation with Mexico’s powerful crime groups. He called the policy “Hugs, not bullets” and immediately began to scale back counterdrug cooperation with the United States.

Some critics of our reporting have asked why we pursued an allegation of corruption that dates back to 2006. It’s a fair question. We viewed this as a case study of the conflicting pressures faced by U.S. officials when they learn of possible corruption in Mexico. While some American officials feel that policing government corruption should be a Mexican responsibility, others note that government collusion has been a crucial element (along with a porous 2,000-mile border and a vast illegal drug market in the United States) fueling the drug gangs’ rise as a global criminal force.

The power of those gangs, which lord over large swaths of Mexican territory and extort businesses across the economy, has become a growing national security problem for both countries. In the United States, annual deaths from drug overdoses have surged over 100,000 in recent years. Hugs notwithstanding, criminal violence in Mexico remains at historic levels. After more than 15 years and $3.5 billion dollars in U.S. aid, bilateral efforts to overhaul Mexico’s criminal justice system have faltered badly.

Washington officials’ ambivalence in the face of Mexico’s corruption problem has become even more acute as immigration has taken center stage in American politics: U.S. officials understand that López Obrador’s administration could react to criminal charges against its officials by easing efforts to stop migrants at the border.

While it might disappoint López Obrador, we do not reveal the identities of the present and former government officials who speak with us for these stories. But we can offer some context on the latest article. This was not an orchestrated leak; the Biden administration officials with whom we spoke were uniformly dismayed that it was going to appear. A spat with a Mexican president — much less any threat of conflict on the immigration front — is not a backdrop they’d like to see for a 2024 presidential election.

López Obrador’s attacks from the palace podium have been personal and vituperative. So here are a few facts. Golden has been reporting on Mexico for three decades, first as The New York Times bureau chief in Mexico City and then as an investigative reporter for the Times and ProPublica. He began working on this story months ago, and the details emerged only from dozens of interviews and internal documents.

López Obrador has advanced multiple theories about how this story came to be. This week, he suggested that Golden was somehow in cahoots with the discredited former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whom he covered in the early 1990s. While Golden did have good sources inside the government in those days, he also produced dozens of deeply reported stories about the explosion of the drug trade under Salinas, the growing shadow of Mexican corruption and the failure of the United States to deal effectively with either problem. That work continued during the tenure of Salinas’s chosen successor, Ernesto Zedillo, whose administration also complained about stories that exposed allegations of high-level corruption.

Some in Mexico have speculated around the fact that similar stories about drug traffickers’ contributions to the 2006 campaign appeared in three foreign outlets simultaneously. Surely, they argue, that is clear circumstantial evidence of a coordinated U.S. campaign to leak information that might undermine the Mexican government.

The truth, as it so often is, is far more mundane. Early in our reporting, we realized that a respected U.S. news organization, InSight Crime, was pursuing the same allegations. Sometimes we collaborate — or compete — in such circumstances. In this case we agreed with Insight Crime that we would each work independently to produce the most thorough and careful stories we could, but coordinate our publication date. We delayed publication and rewrote our stories in order to address a request from the DEA that we not name any confidential government sources.

As sometimes happens, though, a Mexican reporter who writes for the German outlet Deutsche Welle published her own account of the donations and named Soto as a DEA source. With that information public, InSight Crime and ProPublica went ahead and included it in our stories.

Within hours, López Obrador was assailing all three reporters as “vile slanderers.”

The tactic of attacking reporters who reveal uncomfortable truths is as old as democracy itself. But the advent of social media has taken the power of attacks on journalists to new heights. Politicians like López Obrador can now use their platforms to say whatever they want about a reporter and then stand back as armies of friends and bots amplify the message across the internet.

That experience can be difficult for American reporters. But it is a deadly serious business in Mexico, where journalists who investigate organized crime and official corruption are killed with impunity. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 100 Mexican reporters, editors and photographers have been killed just since 2010. The 13 killed in 2022 represented an all-time high.

We hope López Obrador will grant us an interview, but we will continue to write about Mexican corruption and U.S. policy either way.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Stephen Engelberg.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico demanded an apology from President Joe Biden after a ProPublica story disclosed that the Drug Enforcement Administration had found evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides accepted donations of around $2 million from a drug cartel in 2006.

In a press conference on Thursday, López Obrador denounced the accusations as “slander” and threatened to curtail U.S.-Mexican cooperation on drug trafficking and immigration issues.

He also accused ProPublica reporter Tim Golden, the author of the article, of being a “pawn” and “a mercenary in the service” of the DEA.

López Obrador said the ProPublica story was part of a media campaign against him by the DEA and the State Department to damage his political party ahead of the presidential election on June 2.

“President Biden should find out about this, because how are we going to be sitting at the table talking about the fight against drugs if they or one of their institutions is leaking information and harming me,” López Obrador said.

“If they have no evidence, they have to apologize,” he said.

López Obrador’s demand comes at an especially sensitive time for the Biden administration, as it seeks to clamp down on the millions of immigrants who have crossed the southern U.S. border in search of asylum. A recent poll showed that immigration has surpassed inflation as the top issue in the presidential race.

The White House, the DEA and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

ProPublica published its findings on Tuesday, about the same time that two other news outlets, InSight Crime and Germany’s Deutsche Welle, reported on the DEA investigation.

ProPublica said the article was independently produced and reported, noting that it had repeatedly sought comment from the López Obrador administration before publication.

“We shared a detailed summary of our findings with President López Obrador’s spokesperson more than a week before we published, and he chose not to comment,” said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor in chief. “The president has had a lot to say since then, but none of his remarks has identified a single inaccuracy or factual error.”

ProPublica’s article reported that several informants told DEA agents that operatives in López Obrador’s 2006 campaign for president accepted money from the Beltrán Leyva drug mafia. In return, the traffickers were told that a future government would give them a say in naming an attorney general, the informants said. López Obrador did not win that election, but he was voted into office in 2018. As president, he has backed away from confrontation with organized crime groups and scaled back counternarcotics cooperation with the United States.

The DEA investigation — which included testimony from a former campaign operative and a key drug informant — did not establish that López Obrador knew of or approved the donation. However, it found substantial evidence that one of his closest aides had agreed to the arrangement. The investigation was shut down, and no charges were ever filed. Among the reasons, officials in the Department of Justice were concerned that the investigation would be perceived as the United States interfering in Mexico’s politics, ProPublica found.

López Obrador is barred from running for reelection. His party’s candidate is currently leading the race, according to opinion polls. The leading opposition candidate has seized on the accusations.

Golden has written extensively about corruption in Mexico’s government, including a 2022 article about the DEA arrest of former Defense Minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda. The charges against him were dismissed after Attorney General William Barr decided the case was too politically charged to pursue, ProPublica found.

The DEA has a long history of investigating politicians in other countries for drug trafficking. The Associated Press reported this week that the agency spent years running covert operations in Venezuela to build drug cases against some of its leaders.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by T. Christian Miller.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico demanded an apology from President Joe Biden after a ProPublica story disclosed that the Drug Enforcement Administration had found evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides accepted donations of around $2 million from a drug cartel in 2006.

In a press conference on Thursday, López Obrador denounced the accusations as “slander” and threatened to curtail U.S.-Mexican cooperation on drug trafficking and immigration issues.

He also accused ProPublica reporter Tim Golden, the author of the article, of being a “pawn” and “a mercenary in the service” of the DEA.

López Obrador said the ProPublica story was part of a media campaign against him by the DEA and the State Department to damage his political party ahead of the presidential election on June 2.

“President Biden should find out about this, because how are we going to be sitting at the table talking about the fight against drugs if they or one of their institutions is leaking information and harming me,” López Obrador said.

“If they have no evidence, they have to apologize,” he said.

López Obrador’s demand comes at an especially sensitive time for the Biden administration, as it seeks to clamp down on the millions of immigrants who have crossed the southern U.S. border in search of asylum. A recent poll showed that immigration has surpassed inflation as the top issue in the presidential race.

The White House, the DEA and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

ProPublica published its findings on Tuesday, about the same time that two other news outlets, InSight Crime and Germany’s Deutsche Welle, reported on the DEA investigation.

ProPublica said the article was independently produced and reported, noting that it had repeatedly sought comment from the López Obrador administration before publication.

“We shared a detailed summary of our findings with President López Obrador’s spokesperson more than a week before we published, and he chose not to comment,” said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor in chief. “The president has had a lot to say since then, but none of his remarks has identified a single inaccuracy or factual error.”

ProPublica’s article reported that several informants told DEA agents that operatives in López Obrador’s 2006 campaign for president accepted money from the Beltrán Leyva drug mafia. In return, the traffickers were told that a future government would give them a say in naming an attorney general, the informants said. López Obrador did not win that election, but he was voted into office in 2018. As president, he has backed away from confrontation with organized crime groups and scaled back counternarcotics cooperation with the United States.

The DEA investigation — which included testimony from a former campaign operative and a key drug informant — did not establish that López Obrador knew of or approved the donation. However, it found substantial evidence that one of his closest aides had agreed to the arrangement. The investigation was shut down, and no charges were ever filed. Among the reasons, officials in the Department of Justice were concerned that the investigation would be perceived as the United States interfering in Mexico’s politics, ProPublica found.

López Obrador is barred from running for reelection. His party’s candidate is currently leading the race, according to opinion polls. The leading opposition candidate has seized on the accusations.

Golden has written extensively about corruption in Mexico’s government, including a 2022 article about the DEA arrest of former Defense Minister Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda. The charges against him were dismissed after Attorney General William Barr decided the case was too politically charged to pursue, ProPublica found.

The DEA has a long history of investigating politicians in other countries for drug trafficking. The Associated Press reported this week that the agency spent years running covert operations in Venezuela to build drug cases against some of its leaders.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by T. Christian Miller.

Mexican authorities must promptly investigate the government leak that exposed the information and take all necessary steps to prevent such leaks from occurring again, CPJ said Thursday.

According to the reports and images later published by several Mexican and foreign media, the information leaked contained journalists’ full names, their CURP code (a personal identity code similar to a social security number), and a copy of a personal identification document. The last items are of particular concern, as many Mexican reporters use electoral cards as their ID, which include their addresses.

The leak was first reported on Friday, January 26, by several journalists, including Daniel Flores, who posted about it on X, formerly known as Twitter. It is unclear how long the information was publicly available on the website before it was taken down on January 26.

In a January 29 press conference, President Obrador said that his administration is investigating the leak, and several government officials said the information had been extracted from an “inactive government website” by someone using the username and password of a former government employee via an IP address registered in Spain.

The information was extracted on January 22, but the leak was not detected until January 26, the officials said, adding that the personal information of 309—rather than the initially reported 324—reporters had been compromised but denied that the government itself was responsible for the leak and affirmed that the government systems containing personal information are “safe.”

Journalists who attend the president’s daily press briefing—popularly known as la mañanera—and have asked the president critical questions have been subjected to harassment and threats in the past, as CPJ has reported.

“In what continues to be the most dangerous country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere, it is shocking that the personal information of hundreds of reporters can be so easily extracted from government systems and made publicly available, especially considering the many threats and harassment reporters covering the president have been subjected to,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities must immediately identify the perpetrator, bring them to justice, undertake a thorough review of the security of its systems containing sensitive personal information, and ensure that no such leak can occur again in the future.”

Daniel Flores, a reporter with news website Reporte Índigo and one of the journalists whose personal information was leaked, told CPJ that he was advised on January 26 by a former editor that his personal information, including a copy of his electoral card, were available on a website.

“I and some other reporters were able to download the information from that website, so we have to assume that other people were able to do so as well,” Flores told CPJ. “My biggest concern is that it could be used for identity theft.”

In the wake of the leak, the National Institute for Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data (INAI), a federal agency, said in a January 28 statement that it was investigating the data breach.

According to the statement, Mexican privacy laws compel any government agency subjected to a data breach to immediately inform the people whose information has been leaked.

Flores told CPJ that the federal government had not informed the reporters whose information was leaked until it was already widely publicized in national and international media. Rodolfo Montes, a freelance investigative reporter whose data was leaked, also told CPJ that he only received a notification from the office of the president that his data was leaked after the leak had been widely publicized.

Several calls by CPJ to the president’s spokesperson Jesús Ramírez Cuevas between January 26-30 for comment were not answered. CPJ’s email to the INAI did not immediately receive a reply.

Mexico is the deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere for journalists. According to CPJ research, at least two journalists were killed in 2023. CPJ is investigating those killings to determine the motive.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Years before Andrés Manuel López Obrador was elected as Mexico’s leader in 2018, U.S. drug-enforcement agents uncovered what they believed was substantial evidence that major cocaine traffickers had funneled some $2 million to his first presidential campaign.

According to more than a dozen interviews with U.S. and Mexican officials and government documents reviewed by ProPublica, the money was provided to campaign aides in 2006 in return for a promise that a López Obrador administration would facilitate the traffickers’ criminal operations.

The investigation did not establish whether López Obrador sanctioned or even knew of the traffickers’ reported donations. But officials said the inquiry — which was built on the extensive cooperation of a former campaign operative and a key drug informant — did produce evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides had agreed to the proposed arrangement.

The allegation that representatives of Mexico’s future president negotiated with notorious criminals has continued to reverberate among U.S. law-enforcement and foreign policy officials, who have long been skeptical of López Obrador’s commitment to take on drug traffickers.

The case raised difficult questions about how far the United States should go to confront the official corruption that has been essential to the emergence of Mexican drug traffickers as a global criminal force. While some officials argue that it is not the United States’ job to root out endemic corruption in Mexico, others say that efforts to fight organized crime and build the rule of law will be futile unless officials who protect the traffickers are held to account.

“The corruption is so much a part of the fabric of drug trafficking in Mexico that there’s no way you can pursue the drug traffickers without going after the politicians and the military and police officials who support them,” Raymond Donovan, who recently retired as the Drug Enforcement Administration’s operations chief, said in an interview.

In their investigation, DEA agents developed what they considered an extraordinary inside source after they arrested the former campaign operative on drug charges in 2010. To avoid federal prison, the operative gave a detailed account of the traffickers’ cash donations, which he said he helped deliver. He also surreptitiously recorded conversations with Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar, the close López Obrador aide who the operative said had participated in the scheme.

Along with the sworn statements of other witnesses, the taped conversations indicated that Mollinedo was aware of and involved in the donations by one of the country’s biggest drug mafias, current and former officials familiar with the case said.

But some officials felt the evidence was not strong enough to justify the risks of an extensive undercover operation inside Mexico. In late 2011, DEA agents proposed a sting in which they would offer $5 million in supposed drug money to operatives working on López Obrador’s second presidential campaign. Instead, Justice Department officials closed the investigation, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.

“Nobody was trying to influence the election,” one official familiar with the investigation said. “But there was always a fear that López Obrador might back away on the drug fight — that if this guy becomes president, he could shut us down.”

Since taking office in December 2018, López Obrador has led a striking retreat in the drug fight. His approach, which he summarized in the campaign slogan “Hugs, not bullets,” has concentrated on social programs to attack the sources of criminality, rather than confrontation with the criminals.

Yet with police and military forces generally avoiding confrontation with the biggest drug gangs, those mafias have extended their influence across Mexico. By some estimates, criminal gangs dominate more than a quarter of the national territory — operating openly, imposing their will on local governments and often forcing the state and federal authorities to keep their distance. The violence has hovered near historic levels, while the gangs’ extortion rackets and other criminal enterprises have metastasized into every layer of the economy.

The Mexican president’s chief spokesperson, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, did not respond to numerous requests for comment.

The drug trade’s toll on Americans has never been more devastating. Fentanyl — most of which is produced in or smuggled through Mexico — is fueling the most lethal illegal-drug problem in American history. The estimated 109,000 overdose deaths recorded in 2022, most of them fentanyl-related, surpassed the fatalities from gun violence and automobile accidents combined.

The administration of President Joe Biden has been steadfast in its refusal to criticize López Obrador’s security policies, avoiding confrontation even when the Mexican president has publicly attacked U.S. law-enforcement agencies as mendacious and corrupt. The fentanyl explosion, while a growing political concern in Washington, remains less critical to Biden’s reelection prospects than blocking immigrants at the southern border — a challenge in which López Obrador’s cooperation is essential.

After asserting repeatedly that Mexico had nothing to do with fentanyl, López Obrador has recently taken a few modest steps to renew anti-drug cooperation. His government, though, continues to ignore U.S. requests for the capture and extradition of major traffickers, while Washington officials portray the relationship in rosy terms. At the end of a meeting with López Obrador in November, Biden turned to him and said, “I couldn’t have a better partner than you.”

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on details of the DEA investigation into López Obrador’s political campaigns, citing a long-standing policy. But she added that the department “fully respects Mexico’s sovereignty, and we are committed to working shoulder to shoulder with our Mexican partners to combat the drug cartels responsible for so much death and destruction in both our countries.”

For decades, U.S. law-enforcement officials have shied away from investigating Mexican officials suspected of protecting the drug mafias, saying that pursuing such cases is fraught in a country that is uniquely sensitive to American interference. U.S. agencies have been even more hesitant to dig into the gangs’ involvement in electoral politics, even as they have become a primary source of funding for Mexican campaigns and have murdered scores of municipal, state and national candidates.

In the case of López Obrador, the DEA was slow to act on information about his 2006 campaign’s possible collusion with traffickers, several officials said. When the agency finally began to investigate in 2010, it was largely at the initiative of a small group of Mexico-based agents working with federal prosecutors in New York.

The Americans’ initial source was Roberto López Nájera, a tightly wound 28-year-old lawyer who turned up at the United States Embassy in 2008 and asked to speak to someone from the DEA. The two agents who came down from their fourth-floor offices heard a compelling story: For the previous few years, López Nájera told them, he had been a sort of in-house counsel to one of Mexico’s more notorious traffickers, Edgar Valdéz Villarreal.

The Texas-born gangster had been nicknamed “Ken” and then “Barbie” when he was a square-jawed high school linebacker with dirty-blond hair. By the mid-2000s, he had become one of the Mexican underworld’s more brutal enforcers. He was also a major trafficker, working with a larger mafia run by the Beltrán Leyva brothers, who in turn were part of the alliance known as the Sinaloa Cartel. On the Mexican side of the border, he was known as “La Barbie.”

According to López Nájera, La Barbie insisted that he start at the bottom, washing the traffickers’ cars and doing other menial chores before he was entrusted with more important tasks. He eventually managed some political contacts, paying bribes to police commanders and politicians, and oversaw cocaine shipments through the Cancún airport. After several years, however, López Nájera began to have differences with his boss, who thought him something of a slacker, officials said. In 2007, he returned from a long vacation in Cuba to find that his brother had disappeared, an apparent victim of La Barbie’s wrath. Going underground, López Nájera began plotting his revenge.

López Nájera quickly established his bona fides with the Americans, telling them the Beltrán Leyva gang had planted a mole inside the embassy. The man turned out to be an employee of the U.S. Marshals Service who had wide access to intelligence about the Mexican criminals being sought by the United States. Lured to the Washington, D.C., area on the pretense of a training junket, he was arrested and charged with federal drug crimes before agreeing to cooperate, officials said.

The DEA moved López Nájera to the United States and debriefed him extensively. In keeping with the new law-enforcement partnership known as the Mérida accord, U.S. officials then invited their Mexican counterparts to interview their prized source.

The Mexican court filings that resulted would identify López Nájera only by the code name “Jennifer.” His revelations would become the primary engine of “Operation Clean-up,” a headline-grabbing effort by the government of President Felipe Calderón to purge corrupt officials from federal law-enforcement agencies and the military.

The DEA was somewhat slower to take full advantage of its informer. It was only in the spring of 2010, more than two years after López Nájera had begun cooperating with the agency, that it began to focus on one of his more striking disclosures. In an interview in San Diego that DEA agents set up for a senior Mexican prosecutor, López Nájera described how La Barbie had summoned him to a January 2006 meeting at a hotel in the Pacific Coast resort of Nuevo Vallarta.

The man who had arranged the gathering was Francisco León García, the 38-year-old son of a mining entrepreneur from the northern state of Durango. Known as “Pancho” León, he was launching his candidacy for the Mexican Senate as a representative of López Obrador’s leftist alliance. He was friendly with one of La Barbie’s lieutenants, Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a towering former state police officer known as “El Grande,” and the two men thought they might be able to help each other, the agents were told.

Another businessman joined León at the meeting. The two said they were there with López Obrador’s knowledge and support, López Nájera recounted. In return for an injection of cash, León said, the campaign promised that a future López Obrador government would select law-enforcement officials helpful to the traffickers.

According to accounts of the negotiation that U.S. investigators eventually pieced together from several informants, the traffickers were told they could help to choose police commanders in some key cities along the border. More importantly, U.S. officials said, the traffickers were also told that López Obrador would not name an attorney general whom they viewed as hostile to their interests — seemingly granting them a veto over the appointment.

La Barbie agreed to the bargain and assigned López Nájera to meet with campaign officials in Mexico City and arrange the payoffs. (López Nájera did not respond to numerous attempts to contact him.) Soon after, officials said, he was introduced to Mauricio Soto Caballero, a businessman and political operative who was heading up an advance team under the campaign’s logistics chief, Nicolás Mollinedo.

In three deliveries over the next several months, the DEA was told, La Barbie’s organization gave Soto and others in the campaign about $2 million in cash. As the trafficker became more invested, López Nájera said, he provided support in other ways, too: Over the final weeks of the race, López Obrador traveled twice to the state of Durango for big, boisterous rallies organized by Pancho León, to which the gang donated heavily. One was so lavish — with a big-name band and thousands of partisans bused in from outlying towns and villages — that rival politicians demanded an investigation into León’s campaign funding.

The 2006 presidential race was a dead heat. When Mexico’s electoral tribunal declared Calderón the victor by half a percentage point, La Barbie was furious, López Nájera said. The drug boss came up with an impromptu plan to kidnap the president of the tribunal and force him to reverse the decision. A convoy of gunmen was dispatched to storm the court, turning back only when they discovered army troops guarding the area.

Having insisted he was the rightful winner, López Obrador rallied thousands of his supporters to Mexico City for a monthslong sit-in that covered a swath of the capital’s colonial center. According to López Nájera, La Barbie donated funds to help feed the protesters.

The DEA agents who heard López Nájera’s account understood that it would not be easy to build a criminal case, several officials said. Even if they could verify the allegations, high-level corruption cases were almost always hard to prove. Mexican officials used middlemen to insulate themselves from the traffickers who paid them. Politicians and criminals often protected one another; corroborating witnesses were usually reluctant to testify.

Most drug-related crimes also had a five-year statute of limitations. By the time the investigation got underway in earnest, some of the key events that López Nájera described had happened four years earlier.

The Mexican prosecutor who sat in on the López Nájera interview forwarded the allegations to more senior officials in Mexico City. But the Calderón government thought such a case would be too politically charged ahead of the 2012 election, former officials said.

DEA agents had better luck with the Southern District of New York, the powerful federal prosecutor’s office based in Manhattan. The head of the office’s international narcotics unit, Jocelyn Strauber, told them she thought the case was very much worth pursuing, current and former officials said. Strauber, who now leads the New York City Department of Investigations, declined to comment.

While the Southern District had rarely done Mexican drug-corruption cases, Calderón’s determination to work more closely with the United States gave the investigators some hope. U.S. agents had greater freedom to operate in Mexico than ever before; joint operations against traffickers had become commonplace. U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies had helped the Mexican authorities arrest or kill leading figures of some big drug mafias, including the Beltrán Leyva organization. In May 2010, Mexico finally extradited Mario Villanueva, a former governor of Quintana Roo state, who eventually pleaded guilty in New York to funneling more than $19 million in traffickers’ bribes through U.S. accounts.

The investigators also recognized that López Nájera presented an unusual opportunity. Although he had been out of Mexico for more than two years, they thought he might be able to connect them to Soto, the former López Obrador campaign operative to whom he had delivered donations in 2006.

Soto was a gregarious, hustling business consultant with political ambitions of his own. He had worked in and out of government, finding angles and fixing problems with the bureaucracy. López Nájera said they had become friendly and that Soto had helped him with tasks unrelated to the campaign — acting as a front man for his purchase of an apartment in Mexico City’s tony Polanco neighborhood and helping him lease an office and renting a second apartment that La Barbie sometimes used on visits to the capital.

According to López Nájera, Soto had also introduced him to members of the 2006 campaign security team, connections that later proved useful when some of the men moved on to government security jobs. At one point, López Nájera recalled, Soto told him he might be interested in making money in the drug trade if the right opportunity arose.

With López Obrador preparing his second run for the presidency, Soto remained close to Mollinedo, who was still among the candidate’s most-trusted aides, officials said.

“Nico,” as Mollinedo was known, was something of a Mexican celebrity. Wherever López Obrador had gone during his five years as Mexico City’s mayor, Mollinedo had been beside him, at the wheel of the white Nissan sedan that López Obrador made a symbol of his contempt for the traditional excesses of Mexican politics. Mollinedo’s father had been a close friend and supporter of López Obrador’s since his days as a young activist in their native state of Tabasco.

Mollinedo had also been the subject of one of López Obrador’s first big political scandals, which erupted in 2004 with reports that the mayor’s driver earned the salary of a deputy secretary in the municipal cabinet. López Obrador brushed off “Nicogate,” as the newspapers called it, but made it clear that Mollinedo was much more than a chauffeur. He was the mayor’s personal aide and logistics coordinator and worked with his security team. Mollinedo acted as a sometime gatekeeper as well, filtering the people and proposals that clamored for the mayor’s attention.

By early 2010, a raft of Mexican officials had been arrested on López Nájera’s testimony, including a former top drug prosecutor and several senior police and military officials. His identity, though, remained a well-guarded secret, and he was confident that Soto believed he was still working for the narcos. They had last met in San Diego in late 2009, with DEA agents recording their conversation about whether Soto might want to get in on one of the drug deals López Nájera said he was putting together.

It made sense that López Nájera might be branching out on his own. La Barbie had stuck with the Beltrán Leyva brothers in what had been a two-year war with other factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. But now, as the Sinaloans gained the upper hand, La Barbie and the Beltrán Leyvas were fighting each other. The violence made headlines almost every day.

With the agents scripting his messages, López Nájera began texting Soto, officials familiar with the case said. In July 2010, they met at a hotel in Hollywood, Florida. Accompanied by an undercover DEA agent who posed as a Colombian cocaine supplier, López Nájera laid out his pitch: They had some deals in the works. They might need investors. The payoff would be big.

Soto said he was interested.

Weeks after the meeting in Florida, Soto flew to the Mexican-U.S. border to discuss a possible deal with the supposed Colombian trafficker and another undercover agent in McAllen, Texas. When he returned to McAllen in October, the two undercover agents told him they had 10 kilos of cocaine ready for him. But Soto balked, people familiar with the case said, insisting that he wasn’t ready to sell the drugs in the United States.

Needing some way to draw Soto back into their scheme, the undercover agents pressed him to safeguard the cocaine for several days until they could ship it to another buyer. As a reward, they would give him a kilo, worth about $20,000. The drugs were in a car parked nearby, one of the agents said, handing Soto a set of car keys. (There was no actual cocaine.) The conversation was recorded in its entirety.

Sometime after 2 o’clock the next morning, Soto returned to his room at a Courtyard Marriott. DEA agents were waiting.

On the wrong side of the border, without a lawyer or political connections, Soto did not take long to agree to cooperate. “He wasn’t the kind of guy who was ready to go to jail,” one official familiar with the case said. Later that day, after Soto waived his right to be prosecuted in Texas, he was flown to New York City on a commercial jet, sandwiched between a couple of agents in the back row.

Soto would thereafter become a confidential DEA source, known in the case file as CS-1. At the request of the DEA, ProPublica agreed not to identify him and other sources in the case. However, Soto was named in a Spanish-language article about the case published by DW News, the German state broadcast network.

After initially acknowledging messages from a ProPublica reporter, Soto did not respond to detailed questions about his role in the U.S. investigation.

Over several interviews with prosecutors from the Southern District, Soto confirmed that he had taken two deliveries of cash from López Nájera for the 2006 campaign and that a third delivery had been made by another envoy of La Barbie. Soto said the three contributions amounted to somewhat less than the $2 million that López Nájera had claimed, a discrepancy the agents attributed to customary skimming. Soto said he turned the money over to Mollinedo, people familiar with the case said.

In New York, Soto conferred with a court-appointed lawyer before agreeing to the government’s terms: If he continued to work secretly and speak truthfully with the investigators, he would be allowed to return to Mexico. His criminal conviction would remain sealed, and he would eventually be sentenced to the time he had “served” in federal custody — the several days he spent in McAllen and New York. Soto was brought before a federal judge and pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

U.S. officials understood that the arrangement posed serious risks. If Soto informed his colleagues in Mexico that he was being asked to set them up — or even if he just stopped returning phone calls — the Americans’ only leverage would be to expose his guilty plea and perhaps put out an international warrant for his arrest. But Soto would be able to expose their investigation.

The agents’ plan was to confirm the evidence they had gathered about the traffickers’ donations in 2006 and then to reenact a version of that scheme with López Obrador's incipient 2012 campaign — this time with recording devices in place. They called the investigation “Operation Polanco.”

To deploy Soto abroad as a covert or “protected-name source,” in the agency’s lexicon, the DEA had to submit its investigative plan to a group of Justice and DEA officials known as a Sensitive Activity Review Committee. A SARC (pronounced “sark”) is a screening process akin to a legal bomb squad. The panels examine undercover operations that involve the delivery of drugs or money to traffickers or the targeting of corrupt foreign officials; the lawyers try to deactivate the plans that might blow up on the department.

Although targeting the López Obrador campaign was an especially high-risk proposition, the SARC provisionally approved the plan in late 2010, officials said. The agents and prosecutors would have to return to the committee at least every six months for further review, and the scrutiny would intensify as they moved ahead.

The agents wanted to go big. They proposed offering the campaign $5 million in cash in return for promises that a López Obrador government would leave the traffickers alone. If Mollinedo or others in the campaign agreed, the agents would offer a down payment, maybe $100,000. They would then deliver the money to obtain hard evidence of the campaign’s complicity.

Some U.S. officials thought it was an auspicious moment for such a case. In August 2010, Mexican marines had captured La Barbie. Two weeks later, they took down El Grande, his lieutenant, who had attended the 2006 meeting in Nuevo Vallarta. Both men had been indicted on federal charges in the United States and, if extradited, might be enticed to cooperate in return for a reduction of their sentences. In a brief conversation after his capture, El Grande told a DEA agent he was willing to share information about corrupt Mexican officials, but only after he was moved to the United States, documents reviewed by ProPublica show.

But even as new pieces of the investigation came together, the Obama administration was growing concerned about the fallout from another undercover operation, what became known as “Fast and Furious.” Without informing Mexican officials, agents of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed hundreds of high-powered weapons to be shipped illegally into Mexico so they could track them into the hands of drug gangs. The tracking failed, however, and the weapons were later tied to shootings that killed or wounded more than 150 Mexicans as well as the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. The Calderón government was outraged, and the tensions seemed to threaten bilateral cooperation once again.

“Things just came under a different level of scrutiny after Fast and Furious,” a former Justice Department official said. “At that point, everybody was in self-preservation mode.”

Still, American officials had some reason to hope that Mexico’s leaders might countenance — and keep secret — their investigation. Their ultimate target, López Obrador, was Calderón’s hated political rival. The DEA chief in Mexico City would inform the president’s intelligence chief, who was considered particularly trustworthy, and ask him to discuss the case only with Calderón.

The next phase of the investigation began well. DEA agents learned that the businessman who had accompanied Pancho León to the 2006 Nuevo Vallarta meeting was traveling to Las Vegas. When confronted by agents at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino, the businessman confirmed much of what Soto and López Nájera had said. He even mentioned a striking detail that López Nájera had noted: At the 2006 meeting in Nuevo Vallarta, León had given La Barbie a gift. Having heard that the trafficker collected watches, he brought a $20,000 Patek Philippe as a token of his respect.

The prosecutors initially thought they did not have enough evidence to arrest the man, so the agents let him return home after he promised to testify as a witness in any future criminal trial. The investigators had no hope of getting to León: In February 2007, months after losing his Senate race, he disappeared — the rumored victim of a drug-mafia murder.

In Mexico City, DEA agents rehearsed Soto, fitted him with a recording device and, in April 2011, sent him to talk with Mollinedo. It was a disaster. “He was terrified,” a former official recalled. Whether Soto mishandled the equipment or deliberately turned it off wasn’t clear, but he returned with a truncated recording that was often unintelligible because of background noise.

A second attempt the following month yielded about an hour of tape. It was clear from that conversation that Mollinedo knew about the 2006 transaction, people familiar with the case said. He seemed worried about two former members of the campaign security team, who had recently been jailed and might be pressured to reveal what they knew about the traffickers’ contributions. The officials said Mollinedo also mentioned friends in the Mexican attorney general’s office who might help protect him and Soto.

Although it was clear the two men were talking about the 2006 donations, Soto did not press Mollinedo to be more explicit or to incriminate himself more directly. “He never said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ or ‘I don’t know any of those people.’ There wasn’t anything said that cleared him,” one former official said of Mollinedo. “But the tape did not freshen up the conspiracy as much as was needed.”

In an interview, Mollinedo denied that he had ever received donations from drug traffickers and disputed the idea that López Obrador would ever tolerate such corruption. “We didn’t manage money,” he said, referring to his logistics team, adding that it only handled funds it was given to spend on transportation and other campaign expenses.

After going over the recordings, the New York prosecutors were underwhelmed, former officials said. For such a sensitive and risky case, they felt the evidence needed to be nearly irrefutable. The agents nonetheless proposed to move ahead with the sting operation directed at Mollinedo and other López Obrador aides. How they proceeded from there — and whether they went after López Obrador and other politicians in his orbit — would depend on what the agents learned.

When the SARC met to review the case again, just before Thanksgiving 2011, Justice and DEA officials in Washington, D.C., were joined by video link with senior DEA agents in Mexico City and New York. This time, however, the questions were sharper, several people familiar with the meeting said. Even if U.S. Embassy officials informed only trusted Mexican officials, the information could easily leak out, some officials said, and it could be explosive.

DEA representatives at the meeting emphasized that they were not seeking to affect the Mexican election, officials familiar with the meeting said. But they also made the point that if Mexico elected a president who came to office in debt to powerful drug traffickers, the consequences could be catastrophic for the two countries’ law-enforcement partnership.

Not long into the meeting, the video link to Mexico City went down — a common occurrence with the technology of the time. Without the main DEA group working on the case, the tone of the discussion shifted, two people present said. Justice Department lawyers talked about the huge risks of the operation, the uncertain evidence and the still-volatile aftermath of the Fast and Furious scandal, which had prompted some Republicans in Congress to call for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder.

The agents and prosecutors got word of the SARC decision days later — the operation was being shut down.

In May 2012, the Mexican government extradited El Grande. When agents were able to ask him on U.S. soil about the donations to the López Obrador campaign, he confirmed that La Barbie had made them after the meeting in Nuevo Vallarta, two officials said.

López Nájera’s star turn as Jennifer in Operation Clean-up was short-lived.

When the Calderón government was replaced in December 2012, it was not by López Obrador and his leftist alliance but by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the political party that had held the country in a corrupt, authoritarian grip for more than 60 years until 2000. The new president, Enrique Peña Nieto, quickly pulled back from his predecessor’s close law-enforcement cooperation with the United States. Part of that shift was an effort by Peña’s attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, to disparage and reverse the previous administration’s prosecutions of corrupt officials.

According to three officials familiar with the events, Mexican prosecutors continued to interview López Nájera in the United States, but now they sought to exploit gaps and contradictions in his testimony. They asked him to corroborate new details of events he had described, sometimes suggesting specific dates, only to have other witnesses produce alibis for the dates López Nájera had confirmed.

A flurry of Mexican news stories, many of them driven by apparent government leaks, assailed López Nájera as a well-paid liar for the previous regime. Proceso, the country’s leading investigative magazine, revealed his identity with a cover photograph that U.S. officials said came from the Mexican attorney general’s office. Virtually all the officials jailed in Operation Clean-up were released after the charges against them were dropped.

What did not become public was that U.S. law-enforcement officials took the opposite view. While they noted that López Nájera had been inconsistent or mistaken on some points in his statements, almost everything else he had told them held up. So even as López Nájera became a symbol in Mexico of the justice system’s failures, the DEA judged him credible and continued to work with him.

Even before López Obrador took office in December 2018, U.S. officials began to review information from the DEA investigation as part of their effort to assess the new president’s willingness to work with them against the mafias, people briefed on the effort said. But the new Mexican leader soon answered that question himself.

First he sidelined the Mexican commando teams that had been the most trusted partner of U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. He then shut down a federal police unit that the DEA had trained and vetted to work with the Americans on big drug cases.

When DEA agents arrested a former Mexican defense minister, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, on drug-corruption charges in October 2020, López Obrador turned on the agency even more forcefully. With the military high command pressing the president to act in Cienfuegos’ defense, Mexican officials made clear that counter-drug cooperation was at risk. After U.S. Attorney General William Barr dropped the case and repatriated the general, López Obrador declared the Mérida accord “dead” and pushed through strict new limits on how U.S. agents could operate inside Mexico.

López Obrador’s long-standing promises to carry out a crusade against political corruption have produced almost no meaningful results. Although a smattering of corruption charges were announced early in the administration — nearly all against the president’s political adversaries — almost none were successfully prosecuted.

However, López Obrador did call into question the previous administration’s discrediting of Operation Clean-up. In August 2022, his government arrested Murillo Karam on charges of helping cover up the 2014 disappearances of 43 students in the state of Guerrero. Months later, the government announced that the former attorney general would also face corruption charges in connection with more than $1.3 million in hidden income and illicit contracts from which he was said to have profited during his time in office. Murillo Karam has denied the charges.

The president’s former close aide, Mollinedo, left López Obrador’s side after the 2012 campaign to go into business. He later joined Soto in trying to establish a new political party focused on the environment. The effort fizzled out within a year.

Mollinedo told ProPublica that he remains deeply loyal to the president. Although he and his family have been accused of growing wealthy from their political connections, he said his business endeavors have been entirely aboveboard.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Tim Golden.

On November 22, Silvia Arce and Alberto Sánchez, a married couple who founded the news website RedSiete, were abducted by unknown assailants in Taxco, a town in the central state of Guerrero, some 110 miles (177 kilometers) south of the capital Mexico City, according to news reports.

Three days prior, on November 19, journalist Marco Antonio Toledo was kidnapped, together with his wife and son, when unknown armed men forced themselves into his home, according to news reports  and a statement by the Guerrero state prosecutor’s office. Their abduction was reported on November 22. Toledo is editorial director of news website Semanario Espectador de Taxco and a correspondent for privately owned broadcaster N3 Guerrero and news website La Crónica Vespertino de Chilpancingo.

All three journalists regularly report on crime, security and politics.

Arce and Sánchez were released on November 25, followed by Toledo and his wife on November 26, and Toledo’s son on November 28, according to news reports.

Also on November 28, four journalists—Óscar Guerrero, a photographer for news website En Primer Plano; Víctor Mateo, a reporter for news website Ahora Guerrero; Jesús de la Cruz of online news agency El Jaguar, and a fourth victim who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for his safety—were traveling in a car after covering the murder of a bus driver when they were shot at by unidentified gunmen in a car and on a motorcycle in Chilpancingo, Guerrero’s state capital, according to news reports and a statement by Guerrero’s state prosecutor’s office.

Two of the reporters were in a stable but “delicate” condition in a hospital, the two other reporters, who asked to remain anonymous, citing safety fears, told CPJ. All four journalists regularly report on local crime and security, which exposes them to attacks by gangs, they said.

Guerrero is one of Mexico’s most violent states due to turf wars between criminal groups, according to the Wilson Center, a Washington D.C.-based think tank.

On November 29, Maynor Ramón Ramírez, or “El May,” who regularly reports on crime for newspaper Diario ABC Michoacán, was shot by unknown attackers while at his family’s carpet cleaning business in the city of Apatzingán in the drug cartel-dominated neighboring state of Michoacán, according to news reports. Ramírez and another person, who was not identified, were taken to a hospital for treatment, those sources said.

In 2016, Ramírez was shot in the stomach, according to news reports.

“The series of attacks on journalists in Guerrero and Michoacán are shocking, even in a country accustomed to violence against the press, and underscore the Mexican government’s failure to adequately protect the press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “CPJ calls on Mexican authorities to immediately investigate these attacks and bring the culprits to justice, lest these crimes linger in impunity as so many others have before them.”

A spokesperson for the Guerrero state prosecutor’s office, which said in its statements that it was investigating the attacks, did not respond to CPJ’s request for comment via messaging app.

CPJ was unable to find contact information for Ramírez’s family. ABC Michoacán did not reply to a request for comment. CPJ’s phone calls to the Michoacán state prosecutor’s office, which also said in a statement that it was investigating the attack on Ramírez, were not answered.

Tobyanne Ledesma, head of the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, told CPJ that her agency had not had prior contact with the reporters in Guerrero and Michoacán, and it was reaching out to them to offer protection under a federal program run by the federal Interior Ministry. Mexico is the most dangerous country in the Western Hemisphere for journalists. In 2022, 13 journalists were killed in Mexico, the highest number CPJ has ever documented in that country in a single year. At least three of those journalists were murdered in direct retaliation for their reporting on crime and political corruption, while CPJ is investigating the motive behind the 10 other killings.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Gutiérrez, the founder and editor of Notiface, a Facebook-based news website, was talking with four off-duty policemen in the early hours of September 25 in a residential area in the northern city of San Luis Río Colorado when shots were fired from a vehicle, killing the journalist and one officer, and wounding the other three.

Gutiérrez was not the target but simply a neighbor who died “in a collateral manner,” the state prosecutor’s office said in a statement. CPJ was unable to confirm whether the reporter was working at the time.

On September 26, the city’s Mayor Santos González Yescas said in a video statement that three suspects, who were part of an organized crime gang, had been arrested. The mayor said the attack was directed at the policemen and Gutiérrez had walked up to greet them when they were all shot.

“With the brutal killing of Jesús Gutiérrez, Mexico continues its long and tragic streak as the Western Hemisphere’s deadliest country for journalists,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Although the arrest of three suspects one day after the attack is a welcome move in a country where the vast majority of press killings go unpunished, it is vital that authorities determine the motive behind the shootings and whether there was any link to Gutiérrez’s work.”

Vergara, 47, was a veteran crime reporter who was well known locally, particularly for his live broadcasts from crime scenes, according to the online newspaper Infobae. Gutiérrez had recently published posts on Notiface about crime in the city, including an article about the arrest of an alleged drug trafficker and videos of police vehicles responding to an incident.

CPJ was unable to find contact information for Gutiérrez’s family and was not aware of any recent threats against the reporter’s life. Similarly, an official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which protects reporters at risk, told CPJ that it had not been in contact with Gutiérrez or heard of any threats against him. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to publicly comment on the matter.

In 2022, 13 journalists were killed in Mexico, the highest number CPJ has ever documented in that country in a single year. At least three of those journalists were murdered in direct retaliation for their reporting on crime and political corruption, while CPJ is investigating the motive behind the 10 other killings. 

CPJ’s calls to the offices of the mayor and of the state prosecutor and Facebook messages to Notiface were not answered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Thursday, September 14, a federal judge in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato sentenced José Luis Martínez Aguilera, alias ‘El Pizzero,’ to jail and ordered him to pay reparations for the murder of Vázquez, who was shot while investigating reports of human remains found in a street, according to multiple news reports.  

It was the second verdict in Vázquez’s case, after a 20-year sentence was given to Martín Eduardo López Orozco, alias ‘El Tacones,’ on December 14, 2021, according to news reports. Both convicted men were members of a local criminal gang, those reports said.

The Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Committed against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) has appealed for Thursday’s sentence to be increased to 35 years because it did not recognize Vázquez’s work as a journalist as a motive for the crime, according to those reports.

“The second conviction for the brutal murder of Mexico’s Israel Vázquez Rangel is welcome news in a country where most criminals who kill journalists escape justice. However, it is troubling that Vázquez’s work as a journalist was not considered as the principal motive for the attack,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities need to be far more proactive in investigating crimes against the press and ending impunity for those who target journalists.”

Vázquez, a reporter for the El Salmantino news website, was shot at least five times while reporting in the city of Salamanca and died several hours later in hospital.

CPJ has documented 28 unsolved journalist murders in Mexico in the past 10 years—the most of any country on its Impunity Index, which spotlights countries where journalists are murdered regularly and killers go free.

Mexico is the Western Hemisphere’s most dangerous country for journalists. In 2022, 13 journalists were killed in Mexico, the highest number CPJ has ever documented in that country in a single year.  At least three of those journalists were murdered in direct retaliation for their reporting on crime and political corruption, while CPJ is investigating the motive behind the 10 other killings. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The new standards require evidence, such as subcutaneous hemorrhaging, that the livestock animal was alive during the wolf encounter, and additional indicators of wolf involvement.

“Our goal has been to make sure that Mexican gray wolves aren’t being unfairly blamed for livestock depredation,” said Greta Anderson, deputy director of Western Watersheds Project. “The over-reported incidence of wolf involvement in cattle deaths in the Southwest has had negative impacts on the wolf recovery program, including the killing and capture of wild wolves. We’re hoping the new standards help prevent that from happening again.”

Today’s action follows an exposé of Wildlife Services’ unscientific and unsupportable reports, in which a former state director of the agency called out what he saw as corruption in the livestock deaths reporting program. A Western Watersheds Project review of five years of predation reports highlighted poor data collection, illogical conclusions, and an unjustifiably high rate of blaming wolves for the deaths of livestock on public lands.

“It’s appalling that the U.S. Department of Agriculture blames endangered Mexican gray wolves for killing cows that died of something completely different,” said Michael Robinson, a senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity. “I’m glad they’re tightening standards for determining the causes of cattle mortality, but the government should go further and require that ranchers properly dispose of dead cattle to protect both wolves and livestock.”

“We’re happy to see these standards tighten, of course,” said Chris Smith, southwest wildlife advocate for WildEarth Guardians. “But extremely endangered species were wrongly killed before this improvement. And history suggests corruption and a deep-seeded antagonism to wolves within the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”

“Our small but beautiful wolf subspecies, the Mexican wolf, bears the burden of so much undeserved hatred,” said Mary Katherine Ray, wildlife chair for the Rio Grande Chapter of the Sierra Club. “Wildlife Services has a responsibility to not only accurately determine the cause of livestock death but also to help dispel the myths surrounding wolves and promote strategies that avoid conflicts.”

The new standards for the Southwest are the same standards that Wildlife Services and other state agencies, including Montana, Wisconsin, Oregon and Idaho, use to confirm gray wolf involvement in livestock deaths.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

The post Mexican Army Obstructed the Investigation of the Ayotzinapa Case appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kau Sirenio Pioquinto.

On July 15, several unidentified attackers shot and killed Matus, founder and editor of Lo Real de Guerrero, in a parking lot in the Pacific coast city of Acapulco, in Guerrero state.

Lo Real de Guerrero, a news website and Facebook page, frequently covered crime, violence, and security issues in Acapulco, a city long popular with foreign and domestic tourists.

Matus’ killing occurred just one week after reporter Luis Martín Sánchez was found killed in the northern Mexican state of Nayarit.

CPJ repeatedly called the Guerrero public prosecutor’s office for comment but no one answered, and the office has not posted any information about Matus’ case on its official website.

“Mexican journalist Nelson Matus Peña’s brutal killing is all the more shocking given that his life was taken only one week after another reporter, Luis Martín Sánchez, was found dead in Nayarit,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Sadly, Mexican authorities continue to prove ineffective at protecting journalists, who are frequently targeted by such attacks.”

Matus founded Lo Real de Guerrero several years ago and also contributed to local media outlets including Alarma magazine, the El Alarmante newspaper, and news website Agora Guerrero. CPJ contacted those outlets for comment but did not receive any replies.

In the days before his death, Lo Real de Guerrero published several stories without a byline covering violent incidents and deadly shootouts in Acapulco.

Matus escaped a potential assassination attempt by unidentified assailants in 2017, and the mother of Lo Real de Guerrero administrator Reina Balbuena was killed that March, news reports said.

CPJ contacted an official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists for comment but did not receive any response.

According to CPJ research, at least three journalists were murdered in direct relation to their work in Mexico in 2022. CPJ is investigating the killings of another 10 reporters to determine the motive. 

In a country characterized by corruption and organized crime, CPJ has noted the difficulties in determining which journalists were targeted for their work and which were killed as part of the dangerous environment in the country more broadly. 

Mexico ranked sixth on CPJ’s 2022 Impunity Index, which analyzes countries where journalists are killed and their attackers go free. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Sánchez, the correspondent in the northern Mexican state of Nayarit for the Mexico City-based national newspaper La Jornada, was found dead on Saturday, July 8, in El Ahuacate, a suburb of Nayarit’s state capital of Tepic, 500 miles northwest of Mexico City, according to a statement by the Nayarit state prosecutor’s office (FGE). The prosecutor’s office added that his body showed “signs of violence,” and that two pieces of cardboard with handwritten messages were left with the remains.

The FGE did not disclose the contents of the messages, but according to several news reports, one said, “You can write whatever you want, but don’t mess with the family.”

“The shocking killing of Luis Martín Sánchez Iñíguez underscores the crisis of deadly violence and impunity that continues to plague the Mexican press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities must immediately do everything in their power to bring Sánchez’s killers to justice, lest they once again send the message that press killings can be carried out with impunity.”

According to the FGE statement and reports in La Jornada and CriticaDN, where Sánchez was also a contributor, the reporter’s wife Cecilia López first noticed that he had gone missing on the evening of Wednesday, July 5. He had returned home alone to his residence in Tepic following a family visit with her in a nearby town, but once he was no longer answering his cell phone, López’s son went to check the residence. He discovered that his father was missing, along with his laptop, cell phone, and his La Jornada press card.

CPJ contacted López via messaging app but has not yet received a reply.

In an interview with La Jornada published on July 10, Nayarit’s state prosecutor, Petronilo Díaz Ponce Medrano, said that Sánchez’s work as a reporter is “one of the principal lines of investigation,” adding that his office is investigating the killing together with federal investigators.

A spokesperson for the FGE did not answer a request for comment sent via messaging app.

Sánchez, who was 59, joined La Jornada a year and a half ago as a correspondent in Nayarit, according to news reports. He had previously also worked for as a spokesperson for the FGE, according to news reports and Karina Cancino, a reporter based in Tepic, who spoke with CPJ via messaging app.

CPJ found one story with Sánchez’s byline in the online archives of La Jornada, a January report about Mexican federal authorities taking DNA samples from family members of disappeared people in Nayarit. CPJ was unable to find stories with his byline on the website of CríticaDN. CPJ sent requests for comment via messaging app to editors at both publications but did not receive replies.

Several reporters based in Nayarit have told CPJ that journalists in the state often do not use bylines out of fear of reprisal for their reporting, especially when covering crime and violence.

Mexico is the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. At least three reporters were killed in direct relation to their work in 2022, and CPJ is investigating the killings of 10 other reporters that year to determine the motive.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Since March, López Obrador has sharply criticized Article 19, national investigative magazine Proceso, privately owned online news outlets Animal Político and Aristegui Noticias, and Animal Político investigative reporter Nayeli Roldán over their coverage of the Mexican federal government’s alleged use of illegal spyware.

The president’s statements have led to online abuse and threats of violence against Article 19, the three outlets, and their reporters, according to Roldán, Animal Político’s editorial director Daniel Moreno, and Article 19’s regional director Leopoldo Maldonado, who all spoke to CPJ by phone. 

“Mexican President López Obrador’s recent attempts to discredit journalist Nayeli Roldán, three critical news outlets, and Article 19 are more proof that his administration prefers harassing journalists over solving the country’s catastrophic press freedom crisis,” said CPJ Mexico Representative Jan-Albert Hootsen. “López Obrador’s constant verbal attacks on reporters, which serve only as a distraction from the issues they report on, must stop before they lead to further violence against the press.”

Since he assumed office in 2018, López Obrador repeatedly stated that his government does not engage in illegal surveillance with spyware and denied that his administration uses such applications for anything other than national security.

However, a series of reports published in March 2023 provided evidence that the Mexican military used Pegasus, a spyware developed by the Israeli NSO group, to monitor conversations between human rights activist Raymundo Ramos and two journalists at the Mexico City newspaper El Universal since 2019.

In a March 10 press briefing, Roldán asked López Obrador about those allegations, to which he responded by saying Roldán was “always against his government.” When Roldán insisted the military must explain the legal basis for the spying, he accused her of “not being objective,” and called her “unprofessional” and part of the “tendentious, bribed media.”

During an April 28 press conference, the president told reporters that Roldán was paid in 2022 by the National Institute for Access to Information, a federal autonomous body that handles freedom of information requests and regulates the protection of personal data. López Obrador has been highly critical of the institute, which he claims is “useless,” “onerous, opaque, and unnecessarily expensive,” and opposes his administration and him personally, according to news reports.

During a May 2 press briefing, López Obrador accused Article 19 of being funded by the U.S. government to work “against his government,” therefore “violating our sovereignty” and called the organization “interventionist,” adding that he would send a diplomatic cable to the U.S. government “in protest.”  

Moreno, Roldán, and Maldonado told CPJ that the president’s remarks have led to many hateful comments on social media against them personally, as well as on websites and social media pages of Article 19, Proceso, Animal Político, and Aristegui Noticias. Roldán said she received “vicious” misogynistic comments, while Maldonado said he and his organization received many threats and statements echoing the president’s comments.

“I’ve been receiving lots of insults, an increasing number. I’d even call it stalking,” Roldán told CPJ, adding that the pressure has forced her to keep a lower profile on social media. “I can’t send out a single tweet without it receiving insults.” 

Moreno said the president’s comments have made him and his reporters feel less safe, leading some of his reporters to ask not to be named in bylines. 

“We try to respond to the president, who constantly lies about us and never rectifies false information. His daily press briefing is a far bigger platform than anything we could ever hope to have,” Moreno said. “We have seen an increase in the number of attacks and insults against us, including social media users openly asking who our family members are to accost them as well.”

CPJ contacted presidential spokesperson Jesús Ramírez Cuevas for comment via messaging app but did not receive any response.  

Mexico was the deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere for journalists in 2022. At least three reporters were murdered in direct connection to their work, and CPJ is investigating another 10 killings to determine the motive.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The lawmakers stood and shouted soon after Ambassador Zhang Run was welcomed by Santiago Creel, president of the lower house, on April 26 in Mexico City.

Deputies Salvador Caro Cabrera and Inés Parra Juárez of the “Friends of Tibet” group rose from their seats and displayed the Tibetan national flag while shouting “Free Tibet” for about 20 minutes.

Video footage also showed Caro yelling, “Free the Uyghurs! Cancel the concentration camps!” – referring to the detainment of the mostly Muslim Uyghurs in “re-education” camps where they have been subjected to severe rights abuses.

The lawmakers were protesting China’s tight grip on Tibet and Xinjiang, where authorities have restricted the movement of residents and tried to suppress their cultural and religious identities.

Beijing has said that the Uyghur re-education camps were vocational training centers whose purpose was to prevent religious extremism and terrorism in China's restive Xinjiang region. 

Belt and Road

After attending the parliamentary session, Zhang met members of the Mexico-China Friendship Group of the Chamber of Deputies and stressed the importance of the ‘One China’ principle as the political foundation for bilateral relations, according to a Chinese Embassy statement. 

He also welcomed Mexico to participate in the Belt and Road Initiative and other development and security programs.

The Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhists’ spiritual leader, and the Tibetan government in exile in India do not seek separation from China but believe that the Tibet region can coexist with China under genuine autonomy.

Caro and Parra founded “Friends of Tibet,” now comprising 19 legislators from five political parties in the Chamber of Deputies, in November 2022. Its purpose is to support the cause of Tibet by defending Tibetans’ human rights, recognizing their autonomy, defending the environment in the Tibet Autonomous Region, and ensuring freedom of belief and religion.

A day after the group’s formation, diplomats from the Chinese Embassy in Mexico met with Creel to object to the pro-Tibet group and demanded that China’s national flag be waved in the chamber.

In March, several Mexican legislators, including Caro and Parra, traveled to Dharamsala in northern India, headquarters of the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government-in-exile.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the China-Mexico comprehensive strategic partnership.

Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Tibetan.

We go to Ciudad Juárez for an update on the fire that killed at least 38 men held at a Mexican immigration detention center just across the U.S. border from El Paso, Texas. Surveillance video from the jail shows guards walking away as flames spread inside the jail cells, making no effort to open the jail cells or help the migrants who were trapped. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador blamed the fire on the men who were being held at the detention jail, alleging that they set their mattresses on fire to protest conditions, while U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar claimed the tragedy was a consequence of “irregular migration.” The deaths in Mexico came just hours after the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees urged the Biden administration not to adopt a proposed anti-asylum rule that would turn more refugees away at the border. We speak with the U.S.-Mexico border-based journalist Luis Chaparro.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

“The revelations that Mexican authorities have continued to spy on activists, including their communications with reporters, is a shocking confirmation that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s promises to do away with illegal surveillance have not been realized,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “The previous failure to hold officials engaged in spying to account all but guaranteed that little would change. Only a credible, swift, and transparent investigation into these abuses will show that the government is taking such actions seriously.”

Joint reporting published Tuesday, March 7, by The New York Times and the independent Mexican outlet Aristegui Noticias showed that military authorities used Pegasus surveillance software designed by the Israeli firm NSO Group to spy on Ramos.

According to that reporting, an intelligence unit with Mexico’s Defense Secretariat attacked Ramos’ phone on numerous occasions between 2019 and 2020, and listened in on conversations he had with journalists at the newspaper El Universal about alleged extrajudicial executions of civilians in the northern state of Tamaulipas. The documents also revealed that the secretariat accused Ramos of working for a criminal gang in the state.

López Obrador, who assumed office in 2018, pledged that his government would end surveillance and denied the continued use of Pegasus. Past investigations into the use of Pegasus have not led to the arrest of public officials allegedly responsible for the surveillance.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador vowed over the weekend to lead a worldwide movement to end the 61-year U.S. embargo of Cuba.

"We are going to continue demanding the removal, the elimination of the blockade against Cuba, which is inhumane," López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, said Saturday in a speech attended by Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel.

"Mexico will lead a more active movement so that all countries unite and defend the independence and sovereignty of Cuba."

"And not only when it comes to voting at the U.N., which is always won. Only one or two countries abstain or vote against" annual resolutions condemning the embargo, AMLO continued, referring to the U.S. and Israel. "The majority of the countries of the world are in favor of the elimination of the blockade, but the assembly passes and it's back to the same thing."

"Mexico will lead a more active movement so that all countries unite and defend the independence and sovereignty of Cuba," said AMLO, who denounced Washington's attempts to treat the Caribbean island "as a terrorist country or put them on a blacklist of alleged terrorists."

Anti-war activists from CodePink praised AMLO for "once again providing such an important voice against U.S. imperialism and bullying."

Last summer, the Mexican president boycotted the Summit of the Americas, held in Los Angeles, due to the White House's refusal to invite officials from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to the meeting.

"Together with friends in Mexico and around the world, we will unblock Cuba," CodePink tweeted Sunday.

Following Obama-era efforts at normalization, former U.S. President Donald Trump intensified Washington's crackdown on the small island nation, implementing more than 240 punitive policies even as Cubans endured acute shortages of food and medicine amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

One of the Trump administration's most "despicable" actions, according to critics, was its last-minute decision to put Cuba back on the State Department's list of "State Sponsors of Terrorism" (SSOT), a move that has derailed the provision of economic aid and loans made by international financial institutions.

Despite Democratic lawmakers' pleas and President Joe Biden's own campaign pledge to reverse his predecessor's "failed" approach to Cuba, the White House imposed additional economic sanctions against the island following anti-government protests in July 2021 and has so far refused to remove the country from the SSOT blacklist.

Last month, a group of 160 mostly U.S. lawyers implored Biden to "immediately initiate a review and notification process to remove Cuba from the SSOT list," writing that "there is no legal or moral justification" for the country to remain on it.

That letter from the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect came a few months after more than 10,000 people and 100 progressive advocacy groups signed an open letter demanding, to no avail, that Biden reverse Trump's terrorism designation for Cuba and reinstate Obama-era policy toward the nation.

Meanwhile, Cuba has continued to send doctors to various parts of the world to help tackle Covid-19 and other diseases. In defiance of more than six decades of harmful U.S. sanctions, the biggest export of the island, which has a lower child mortality rate than its more powerful and hostile neighbor to the north, is medical care.

On Saturday, AMLO thanked Díaz-Canel for sending Cuban doctors to provide healthcare in remote areas of Mexico.

Díaz-Canel, for his part, also expressed gratitude during his visit to Mexico's southeastern port city of Campeche.

"I once again thank our brother nation for its solidarity with the Cuban people, who have faced tremendously difficult challenges in the last few years and months due to a combination of the blows of nature and the effects of the toughened blockade," said Díaz-Canel.

"I once again thank our brother nation for its solidarity with the Cuban people, who have faced tremendously difficult challenges in the last few years and months."

Last summer, a few weeks after 55 House Democrats joined their Republican counterparts to defeat Rep. Rashida Tlaib's (D-Mich.) legislative attempt to make it easier for an economically battered Cuba to import food grown by U.S. farmers, the island was further devastated by a catastrophic oil fire.

Despite the best efforts of a handful of progressive lawmakers who urged the Biden administration to do more, the U.S. limited its disaster response to phone consultations and refused to repeal sanctions even as they created barriers to delivering humanitarian aid. Mexico, by contrast, dispatched firefighting resources to help contain the blaze.

On Saturday, AMLO awarded Díaz-Canel the "Order of the Aztec Eagle," Mexico's highest honor for foreigners. Previous recipients include Gabriel García Márquez, a Colombian novelist and Nobel literature laureate, and Nelson Mandela, a South African anti-apartheid organizer and eventual president of his country.

In addition, AMLO and Díaz-Canel participated in bilateral talks to outline plans for further cooperation on matters of trade and healthcare.

“The U.S. government should lift, as soon as possible, the unjust and inhuman blockade of the Cuban people," AMLO said Saturday. "It's time for a new coexistence among all the countries of Latin America."

The Mexican president argued that U.S. policy toward Cuba "is completely worn out, anachronistic, it has no future or point, and it no longer benefits anyone."

"Its people and government are deeply humane," AMLO said of the island nation. "Long live the dignified people of Cuba!"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

A criminal gang in the Guerrero town of Arcelia abducted García along with journalist Jesús Pintor Alegre and media worker Fernando Moreno Villegas in late December, according to news reports.

On January 7, García, the founder and editor the Facebook-based news outlet Escenario Calentano, and Moreno, an administrator at the outlet, were seen in chains in a video published by the outlet. In the video, Moreno said that they were “facing the consequences for what we said about these people from the Tierra Caliente region,” where Escenario Calentano is based. The outlet’s Facebook page is viewable in Mexico but not from the United States.

Moreno and Pintor, a writer and former correspondent for the defunct regional newspaper La Jornada de Guerrero, were released on January 11, according to news reports.

CPJ was unable to determine García’s whereabouts as of February 6. A local reporter, who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their safety, said it was unclear whether he had been released or was still being held by the criminal gang.

“Mexican authorities must take all steps possible to account for the whereabouts of journalist Alan García, and should ensure that those who kidnapped García, Jesús Pintor, and Fernando Moreno are found and held to account,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Authorities must show that they are able to provide reporters with even the most basic guarantees that they can conduct their work without fearing for their lives or liberty.”

Escenario Calentano regularly covers organized crime in the region around the Guerrero city of Ciudad Altamirano, including Arcelia. In the months leading up to the abduction, the website posted about La Familia Michoacana, a criminal gang active in the region, as well as alleged political corruption.

The reporter who spoke to CPJ said the outlet’s coverage of La Familia Michoacana, which is in a power struggle with other gangs in the area, may have angered the gang and led to the abductions.

The Guerrero state prosecutor’s office published a short statement on January 10 announcing that it was investigating the abductions. A follow-up statement the next day said state authorities were coordinating the investigation with federal authorities, but did not give any further details. CPJ repeatedly called the prosecutor’s office for comment but did not receive any replies.

CPJ sent several messages to Pintor via messaging app after his release, but did not receive any responses. CPJ was unable to find contact information for García or Moreno.

According to news reports by Amapola, a Guerrero-based news website that has closely followed the case, García founded Escenario Calentano five years ago and is its principal editor. Moreno works as an administrator of the outlet, according to those reports; other reports said that Moreno also worked as a spokesperson for the Arcelia municipal government. Pintor knows the other two men personally but was not involved in Escenario Calentano, those reports said.

According to CPJ data, at least three journalists were killed in Mexico for their work in 2022. CPJ is investigating another 10 killings to determine their motives.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

कि तब धरती पर आधुनिक बिजली भी नहीं थी,||
~ धरती पर आधुनिक तकनीकी यंत्र भी नहीं थे,||
~ जबकि प्रमाण हमारे मंदिरों की दीवारों पर है लेकिन हम मन्दिर जाते हीं नहीं हैं ,||#सनातन_धर्म_सर्वश्रेष्ठ_है

— राष्ट्रवादी भारतीय (@RVDhindustani) January 30, 2023

The viral claims date back to August 2022. (Archive)

1400 साल पहले पल्लव राजा नरसिंह द्वारा निर्मित लालगिरी मंदिर में एक कम्प्यूटर तथा कीबोर्ड के साथ बिजली का तार और ये सब पत्थर की दीवार पर बनाई गई हैं, यह कैसे हो सकता है..?

तब ये आधुनिक बिजली भी नहीं थी, ये आधुनिक तकनीकी यंत्र भी नहीं थे, उन्होंने इसकी कल्पना किस तरह की होगी..? pic.twitter.com/EFOZSqbpqN

— Veere Vishal (@VeereVishal) August 8, 2022

The image is also viral on Facebook.

Alt News has received multiple requests on its WhatsApp helpline (76000 11160) and its app to verify the authenticity of the claim.

Fact Check

Upon a reverse image search of the image, we were led to Mexican artist Raúl Cruz’s ArtStation profile wherein this image has been listed as one of his original artworks. The artwork, titled Memory of the Future, was posted four years ago.

Artist Raúl Cruz is described as a freelance illustrator/fine artist on his About page on ArtStation. According to the page, Cruz’s work falls under the genre of Fantastic Art. Futurist aesthetics and science fiction combined with Mesoamerican art directly influenced his work, mixing the past and the present with unpredictable futures. This trait is clear in the artwork that is viral.

We also found this artwork on his Instagram page, posted in September 2018. The image is captioned “Memoria del futuro, acrylic on fiberglass, 2015″.

Furthermore, we found that this artwork had been used as cover art in a book named ‘Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain’. Cruz has been credited for the cover design, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

Hence, an image of a seemingly ancient engraving of a man seated in front of a computer is viral with the claim that the sculpture was made 1400 years ago in India during the time of a Pallava King. In reality, the artwork was created by artist Raúl Cruz. He uploaded the image on Instagram in 2018.

The post Mexican artist’s work viral as Pallava sculpture showing use of computer in ancient India appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Shinjinee Majumder.

Starting on the morning of Thursday, January 5, members of the Sinaloa drug cartel have clashed with Mexican security forces in the city, and suspected cartel members have harassed and robbed reporters covering the unrest, according to news reports and reporters who spoke with CPJ.

Marcos Vizcarra, a freelance reporter, told CPJ by phone that an unidentified man, whom he suspected was a cartel member, stopped him at gunpoint and stole his car. Later, when he went to a local hotel, gunmen entered the building and also stole his phone, he said.

Separately, gunmen forced three journalists working for local and national outlets to exit a car they were traveling in together, and then stole their car, cell phones, and laptops, those journalists told CPJ on the condition of anonymity, citing concern for their safety.

None of the journalists were physically hurt and, as of Friday morning, were able to return home safely, they told CPJ.

“Mexican authorities must immediately step up their efforts to protect journalists covering unrest in Culiacán, which has become akin to reporting from a war zone,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Unless authorities finally protect the press and bring those who attack reporters to justice, the harassment and blatant robberies of journalists will likely continue.”

Aarón Ibarra, a reporter for local investigative weekly RíoDoce, told CPJ via messaging app, “There are no conditions to work, we can’t guarantee our safety.”

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which operates under the auspices of the federal Interior Ministry and provides protection to reporters, told CPJ that the agency had contacted the National Guard to coordinate reporters’ safety during the fighting.

The official declined to provide more details, citing the ongoing events, and asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to comment on the matter.

The fighting in Culiacán broke out in the early hours of Thursday when Mexican security forces arrested Ovidio Guzmán, an alleged leader of the Sinaloa cartel, according to comments by Secretary of Defense Luis Crescencio Sandoval.

CPJ called the Sinaloa state prosecutor’s office to inquire whether authorities were investigating the attacks on journalists, but did not receive any response.

Mexico is the deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere for reporters. At least three journalists were murdered in retaliation for their work in 2022, according to CPJ research. CPJ is investigating another 10 killings to determine the motive. 

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Over five years have passed since Villarreal and Ismael Bojórquez, RíoDoce’s co-founder and editor-in-chief, received the suspicious text messages that experts said bore telltale signs of Pegasus, the now notorious surveillance software developed by Israeli firm NSO Group. Just this month, a joint investigation by three Mexican rights groups and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab found evidence of Pegasus infections on the devices of two Mexican journalists and a human rights defender between 2019 and 2021 – infiltration that occurred in spite of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s 2018 promise to end illegal surveillance. (López Obrador denied on October 4 that his administration had used Pegasus against journalists or political opponents, saying, “if they have evidence, let them present it.”)

The previous Mexican administration also denied using the technology on high-profile journalists, even after the Pegasus Project, a global consortium of investigative journalists and affiliated news outlets that investigated the use of the spyware, reported in 2021 that more than two dozen journalists in Mexico have been targeted with the spyware. Those named included award-winning investigative journalist Carmen Aristegui and Jorge Carrasco, the editor-in-chief of the country’s foremost hard-hitting investigative magazine Proceso. Yet although the surveillance caused considerable outrage, almost nothing has changed since 2017, according to Villarreal, who spoke to CPJ from Sinaloa’s capital, Culiacán.

Read CPJ’s complete special report: When spyware turns phones into weapons

In what CPJ has found to be by far the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere, there remains no legal protection from intrusive surveillance, no recourse for its victims, and no repercussions for those in public office who facilitated the spying.  

López Obrador’s pledge to stop illegal surveillance was one of his first major undertakings after he took office in December 2018. Eleven months later, he assured Mexicans that the use of the Israeli spyware would be investigated. “From this moment I tell you that we’re not involved in this. It was decided here that no one will be persecuted,” he said.

But with just over two years left in office – Mexico’s constitution allows presidents to serve only a single six-year term – journalists, digital rights groups, and human rights defenders say little has come of the president’s promises. Not only has the investigation into the documented cases of illegal use of Pegasus shown no meaningful progress, the critics say, but also virtually nothing has been done to prevent authorities from continuing to spy. 

“Unfortunately, the regulatory situation and the authorities’ capacity to intercept communication have remained intact,” said Luis Fernando García of Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales (R3D), a Mexico City-based digital rights group that supports reporters targeted with Pegasus. “There’s very little transparency, very little publicly available information about the use of such technologies, which makes repetition a very real possibility.”

CPJ contacted the office of President López Obrador’s spokesperson for comment before publication of the October report about the most recent infections but did not receive a reply.

NSO says it only sells Pegasus to government and law enforcement agencies to combat terrorism or organized crime. But investigative journalists report that in countries like Mexico non-state actors, including criminal groups, can also get their hands on these tools even if they are not direct clients. This poses a major threat to journalists and their sources across the region, where CPJ research has found that organized crime groups are responsible for a significant percentage of threats and deadly violence targeting the press. At least one Mexican journalist who was killed for his work, Cecilio Pineda Birto, may have been singled out for surveillance the month before his death.

Villarreal and Bojorquez received the first Pegasus-infected text messages just two days after Javier Valdez Cárdenas, Riodoce co-founder and a 2011 recipient of CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award, was fatally shot on May 15, 2017, near the magazine’s offices in northern Sinaloa state. 

“Although it had all the hallmarks of Pegasus, it took us quite a while before we realized what was happening,” Villarreal recalled. “We were in a very vulnerable state after Javier’s death. It wasn’t until approximately a month later, after contact with press freedom groups, that we realized that it was Pegasus.”

A 2018 report by R3D, citing findings by Citizen Lab, stated that the likely source of Villarreal’s surveillance was the Agency of Criminal Investigation, a now-defunct arm of the federal attorney general’s office. Two autonomous federal regulators subsequently established that the attorney general’s office used Pegasus illegally and violated privacy laws.

However, an ongoing federal investigation initiated under the previous government of President Enrique Peña Nieto has not led to any arrests of public officials. In December 2021, Mexican authorities requested the extradition from Israel of the former head of the criminal investigation agency, Tomás Zerón, in connection with various investigations – reportedly including the Pegasus abuses – but that request has not yet been granted. (CPJ contacted the federal attorney general’s office for comment on the extradition, but did not receive a reply.)

Concerningly, according to Proceso, investigators of the federal state comptroller revealed in the audit of the federal budget in October 2021 that the López Obrador administration had paid more than 312 million pesos (US $16 million) to a Mexican businessman who had facilitated the acquisition of Pegasus in the past.

The López Obrador administration has not publicly responded to Proceso’s findings or the state comptroller’s report, but the president did say during his daily press briefing on August 3, 2021, that there ‘no longer existed a relationship’ with the developer of Pegasus. The president’s office had not responded to CPJ’s request for comment on the payment by the time of publication.

Experts at R3D and Citizen Lab said Pegasus traces on a journalist’s phone indicated they were hacked as recently as June 2021, just after they reported on alleged human rights abuses by the Mexican army for digital news outlet Animal Politico. The journalist was not named in reports of the incident.

“I don’t think anything has changed,” Villarreal said. “The risk continues to exist, but the government denied everything.”

R3D, together with a number of other civil society groups, has also pushed hard for new legislation to curb the use of surveillance technologies by lobbying directly to legislators and via platforms like the Open Government Alliance. So far, the result has been disappointing. Even though López Obrador and his party, the Movement of National Regeneration (Morena), hold absolute majorities in both chambers of federal congress and have repeatedly acknowledged the need to end illegal surveillance, there has been no meaningful push for new legislation on either the state or the federal level.

“There is indignation about surveillance, but my colleagues aren’t picking the issue up,” said Emilio Álvarez Icaza, an independent senator who has been outspoken about surveillance. “It’s an issue that at least the Senate does not seem to really care about.”

R3D’s García warns that Pegasus is just a part of the problem. R3D and other civil society groups say they have detected numerous other technologies that were acquired by state and federal authorities even after the scope of Pegasus’ use became clear.

“We’ve been able to detect the proliferation of systems that permit the intervention of telephones and there are publicly available documents that provide serious evidence that those systems have been used illegally,” García said. “The [attorney general’s office], for example, has acquired the capacity to conduct more than 100,000 searches of mobile phone data, but only gave clarity about 200 of them.”

“Even with regulation, the Mexican justice state has a tremendous problem of lack of transparency and accountability. The entire system seems to have been constructed to protect public officials,” said Ana Lorena Delgadillo, a lawyer and director of the Fundación para la Justicia, which provides legal support to Mexicans and Central Americans searching for ‘disappeared’ family members. “This is why I believe it’s important that cases of this nature are ultimately brought to the Supreme Court, but it’s hard to find people willing to litigate.”

Villarreal said he will not be one of those afraid to speak out. “Ultimately we’ve left our cases in the hands of civil society organizations,” he said. “Thing is, the spyware is just a new aspect of a problem that has always existed. The authorities have spied here, they will continue to do so. We have to adapt to the reality that we’ll never know the extent of what’s going on.”

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ Mexico Correspondent.

The Mexican standoff over the closure of Papua New Guinea government offices due to nonpayment of rentals has ended.

The National Court has ordered superannuation fund landlord Nambawan Supa Limited (NSL) to remove all locks to Vulupindi Haus, Treasury Haus, Eda Tano Haus in Waigani and Revenue Haus in downtown Port Moresby.

At the same time, the government has honoured its commitment to pay a further instalment of K30 million (NZ$15.3 million) to NSL, bringing the outstanding total paid up to K82 million (NZ$42 million).

• READ MORE: Lockout threat in PNG over government rent arrears

The Waigani National Court presided by acting judge Justice Emma Wurr granted on Friday the ex-parte application filed by Finance Secretary Dr Ken Ngangan for the removal of locks to the buildings.

Dr Ngangan instituted the proceeding as the chairman of the Government Office Allocation Committee through his lawyer Milfred Wangatau of ACE Lawyers, ordering Nambawan Super Ltd to remove the locks on government offices.

NSL had locked doors to its buildings that housed major government departments over outstanding rental arrears.

The five major government agencies affected were the Department of Finance, Department of Treasury, Department of Lands, Department of National Planning and Internal Revenue Commission.

During the hearing, Wangatau submitted to the court that the state had paid NSL more than K50 million in September.

Committed to settle arrears
He submitted that while the state did admit that there may be some outstanding rental arrears, it stood committed to settle its arrears but NSL decided to go ahead and lock the offices.

“NSL’s abrupt decision to lock out very important government public service delivery agencies should be the last resort as it only goes to hold the people of the nation at ransom when vital government services are disrupted,” Wangatau submitted.

He added that damages would be irreparable if the reliefs sought in the application were not granted as it would certainly have an adverse effect on the public at large.

Wangatau further submitted that it was in the interest of justice that the court should grant temporary mandatory orders ordering NSL to unlock all the government offices and allow government business and public service delivery to return to normalcy pending the substantive hearing.

Justice Wurr agreed and granted the interim orders and adjourned the matter until this Friday, for inter parte hearing.

Among the orders issued, Justice Wurr ordered that the defendant (NSL), its employees, servants and agents must immediately unlock all doors to the Vulupindi Haus, Revenue Haus, Treasury Haus and Eda Tano Haus to allow staff and officers of the respective state departments to have access to ensure government business and service delivery can resume as usual.

Justice Wurr ordered NSL to comply with the orders immediately upon services of the orders.

NSL ‘relieved’
Meanwhile in a press statement, NSL said it was relieved to receive a further K30 million payment from the state last Friday in its new commitment to offset rental arrears it owes to the fund’s contributing members.

This brings the total amount paid by the state to K82 million.

And representatives from the Departments of Finance and Treasury have signed a Letter of Agreement committing to pay the outstanding balance of K90 million in a series of monthly payments starting in November.

Nambawan Super chairman Mr Reg Monagi said: “We are pleased to have received the second payment of K30 million and we thank the Departments of Finance and Treasury, who after extensive discussions and negotiations, have committed to an agreement for the settlement of these arrears.”

“Acting in good faith after the State’s positive actions, on Friday night, we lifted the lockout of the Revenue Haus (Internal Revenue Commission), Vulupindi Haus (Department of Finance) and EdaTano Haus (Department of Lands & Physical Planning) and Treasury Haus (Department of Treasury).

“We hope that as we have acted in good faith, the State will continue to honour its commitment to our members by settling the remaining outstanding rental arrears.

Retirement outcomes ‘now protected’
“Nambawan Super appreciates that the State has recognised how important the payment of these arrears are to ensuring that our over 214,000 members’ retirement outcomes are protected.

“The unpaid rentals that accumulated over three years have already impacted the returns for members causing fewer funds available to reinvest and grow.”

“Any further delays to the scheduled payments will have a further detrimental impact on the returns of Nambawan Super members.”

“NSL remains committed to working closely with the State to ensure the payment of all outstanding arrears are made as agreed in the payment schedule, and will not hesitate to lock out the State again if it is unable to do so,” Monagi said.

Republished with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

“This new report definitively shows that Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador can no longer hide behind blaming his predecessor for widespread use of Pegasus in Mexico,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities must immediately and transparently investigate the use of Pegasus and other spyware to target journalists during his administration, as well as push for more regulations to end the use of this technology against the press once and for all.”

The report was published by the Mexican digital rights organization R3D (Red en los Defensa de los Derechos Digitales) and rights and research groups Article 19 and SocialTIC. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab conducted a forensic analysis of the devices.

The device of an unnamed journalist from the online outlet Animal Político was infected in 2021, according to the report. Journalist Ricardo Raphael, a columnist for news magazine Proceso and newspaper Milenio Diario who was previously targeted in 2016 and 2017, was hacked with Pegasus at least three times in October and December 2019 and again in December 2020.

According to Citizen Lab, the more recent cases differ from previous use of Pegasus against Mexican journalists in several ways, including the use of zero-click attacks rather than malicious text messages designed to trick targets into clicking on links triggering an infection.

CPJ has documented how spyware is used to target journalists and those close to them worldwide, including repeated cases of Pegasus infections targeting journalists in Mexico, and has called for a moratorium on its trade pending better safeguards.

Israeli firm NSO Group says it only licenses its Pegasus spyware to government agencies investigating crime and terrorism. Mexican president López Obrador said in his daily press conferences earlier today that his government may address the revelations later this week.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Flores, the founder and editor of Chiapas Denuncia YA, a Facebook page with 66,000 followers that publishes citizens’ reports about crime, security, and alleged government corruption, was last seen in a supermarket parking lot in the city of Comitán, 600 miles southeast of Mexico City in Chiapas state near the border with Guatemala, around 11:30 a.m. on September 20, according to news reports. 

The circumstances of the journalist’s disappearance are unclear, according to Isaín Mandujano, the Chiapas correspondent for news magazine Proceso, and two Chiapas-based journalists, who spoke to CPJ via phone and requested anonymity for safety reasons.

Authorities have not yet determined whether Flores was abducted, Ezequiel Gómez, a spokesperson for the Chiapas state prosecutor’s office (FGE), told CPJ by phone, adding that FGE has opened an investigation and state authorities notified the National Search Commission, a federal body that investigates disappearances, about Flores on September 21.

“We are deeply concerned about the disappearance of Roberto Flores, especially given the spike in violence against journalists in Mexico that has made this the deadliest year on record for the country’s press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities must do everything in their power to locate Flores and return him safely to his loved ones.”

Mexico is the deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere for journalists. According to CPJ research, at least three journalists were murdered in direct relation to their work in 2022. CPJ is investigating another 10 killings to determine whether the motive for their killing was related to their journalism.

Flores, 41, founded Chiapas Denuncia YA in 2018 and also worked as a security guard, according to the three Chiapas-based reporters. 

Around the time of Flores’ disappearance, Chiapas Denuncia YA posted a report about criminal gangs in the city, which was removed shortly afterward, according to a Comitán-based reporter, who spoke to CPJ by telephone on the condition of anonymity, citing safety concerns. The reporter was unable to provide more details on the post’s contents.

The reporter added that Comitán has recently seen a surge in disappearances and deadly shootouts between members of criminal gangs. According to a September 23 report on the news website La Silla Rota, a municipal official in a town near Comitán disappeared on the same day as Flores. The article connected the disappearances to conflicts between criminal gangs in the area.

Recent reports on Chiapas Denuncia YA included posts accusing several public officials of abusive or corrupt behavior.

CPJ’s calls to the National Search Commission were not answered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Bustillos, a veteran reporter based in Tehuacán in the central Mexican state of Puebla, currently works for privately owned news sites Domingo7 Tehuacán and Grupo Entiempo Comunicaciones, which post their coverage on Facebook. Bustillos told CPJ by phone on Wednesday, September 14, that two unidentified gunmen threatened him over his reporting the previous day. Bustillos said that the men approached him on a motorcycle around 4:30 p.m. while he walked on a street near the center of Tehuacán, a town about 150 miles southeast of Mexico City.

“One of them embraced me and showed me a pistol,” Bustillos said. “He said I should stop reporting. He took out the magazine of the gun, showed me the bullets and said that if I didn’t do as he said, that those would be for me.”

The other man waited on the motorcycle, Bustillos said, adding that he was not physically harmed during the incident. Bustillos said the men did not refer to specific coverage, and believes they may be affiliated with Las Burras, a local criminal gang linked to several violent incidents in the area in recent months, according to news reports.

“The brazen threat against Rodrigo Bustillos is more shocking evidence that reporters are targeted everywhere in a country that is experiencing a horrifically deadly year for the press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities must immediately guarantee Bustillos’ safety, determine the identity of his attackers, and bring them to justice.”

Bustillos said he covers a wide range of topics, including crime and safety. Most news articles and videos uploaded to the websites do not carry a byline, according to Bustillos, in some cases out of concern for the safety of the reporters.

On Sunday, September 11, Bustillos covered the discovery of a clandestine burial site in Tehuacán. According to his reports, which cited anonymous local law enforcement sources, the grave may have been used by Las Burras to dispose of victims. In another Domingo7 report by Bustillos on Wednesday, September 14, an alleged leader of the Las Burras gang was arrested in the wake of the discovery.

In recent weeks, there have been several shootings and executions that killed at least six people and that local law enforcement attributed to criminal gangs in Tehuacán, Bustillos said. One victim was a policeman fatally shot on September 5, according to a Primera Línea report.

Bustillos said he believes the threat may have been directly related to his coverage of the the gravesite and the gang leader’s arrest. He is still considering whether he will report the threat to authorities. “Reporting to local authorities here can frankly be risky, because there’s a lot of corruption. I’m not sure if I can trust them,” Bustillos said.

On Thursday, September 15, CPJ made several calls to the Tehuacán municipal government for comment, but the calls were not answered. (September 15 is a national holiday in Mexico.) CPJ made several attempts to reach the editors of Domingo7 and Grupo Entiempo via phone, but the calls were not answered.

CPJ helped the journalist contact the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which operates protection programs sanctioned by the federal government in Mexico City. On Wednesday, September 14, both Bustillos and a group official, who asked not to be named, confirmed via WhatsApp that the journalist is in the process of being enrolled in a protection program.

Mexico is the deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere for journalists. A record 13 journalists were killed in the country this year so far, according to CPJ research. At least three of the reporters were killed in direct relation to their work. CPJ is investigating another 10 killings to determine the motive.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Monday, August 22, two unidentified attackers on a motorcycle shot and killed Román, founder of the La Realidad newspaper and a columnist for the Vértice de Chilpancingo newspaper, as he left his home and entered his car in Chilpancingo, the capital of the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, according to multiple news reports and a statement by the state prosecutor’s office.

In that statement, the prosecutor’s office said it did not rule out any motive, and mentioned that Román’s son Bladimir was also shot and killed on July 1. The statement said authorities were investigating whether the attacks were related. CPJ was unable to find any statements by authorities about the motive for the killing of Román’s son.

“The brutal killing of Fredid Román underscores the Mexican government’s utter failure to make the country safe for reporters,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Only by apprehending Román’s attackers and determining whether he was killed because of his work can Mexican authorities regain some of the trust this year’s catastrophic series of deadly attacks has eroded almost completely.”

CPJ repeatedly called the state prosecutor’s office for comment, but no one answered.

According to Pablo Israel Vázquez, the editor of Vértice de Chilpancingo, Román, 60, had worked for 35 years as a reporter for several regional newspapers in Guerrero.

“He was one of the old guard,” Vázquez told CPJ in a phone interview. “He was a serious man, not someone who would get into trouble.”

Román was also active in politics in the 1990s and early 2000s, serving as a spokesperson for the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution and several institutions within the Guerrero state government, according to the website Enciclopedia Guerrerense.

In 2009, Román founded La Realidad, a newspaper covering current events and politics in Guerrero and Chilpancingo; the paper folded in early 2022 due to financial difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Vázquez.

Román remained active as a columnist for Vértice de Chilpancingo with his weekly “La Realidad Escrita” column, which focused on regional and national politics. In his most recent column, Román wrote critically of the Ayotzinapa Truth Commission, an independent federal body created by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to investigate the mass abduction of 43 students in Guerrero in 2014.

Vázquez told CPJ that he was unaware of any threats against Román’s life. “He sent his columns via email to the newspaper, but I often met him in the streets and he seemed relaxed,” he said.

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which provides federal protection to journalists, told CPJ that Román was not enrolled in a protection program by the agency. The official asked to remain anonymous, as they were not authorized to comment.

Mexico is the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere, according to CPJ research. At least three journalists were murdered in direct relation to their work this year, and CPJ is investigating another 10 killings, including Román’s, to determine the motive.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Arjón, the founder and editor of Facebook-based news outlet A Qué Le Temes, was found dead on Tuesday, August 16, in San Luis Río Colorado, a town in the northern Mexican state of Sonora on the U.S. border, according to news reports. According to an August 16 statement by the Sonora state prosecutor’s office (FGE), Arjón’s body was found near an expressway southwest of San Luis Río Colorado. In the statement, the FGE said the reporter appeared to have died from a violent blow to the head.

Arjón, 62, was first reported missing on social media on August 9, according to news reports, although the FGE said on August 15 on Twitter that no official missing person report had been filed. The FGE statement said the prosecutor had not yet ruled out any line of investigation.

On Wednesday, August 17, San Luis Río Colorado municipal authorities told local media that a suspect was arrested for his alleged involvement in the abduction and killing of Arjón and that the vehicle allegedly used while carrying out the crime had been located on August 3. According to the statement, the vehicle had been reported stolen in the U.S. state of California. No further details about the identity of the suspect of the motive for the killing were given.

Several telephone calls by CPJ to the FGE for comment on August 16 and 17 were not answered.

“The tragic and brutal killing of Juan Arjón López is only the latest in a year that is already one of the deadliest in recent history for the Mexican press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Although some arrests have been made in earlier cases of press killings this year, an ongoing climate of impunity continues to fuel these attacks. Mexican authorities must conduct a swift and thorough investigation into Arjón’s killing and bring those responsible to justice.”

According to Humberto Melgoza, the editor of San Luis Río Colorado-based website Contraseña and a friend of Arjón’s, the reporter started the outlet on Facebook several months before his death. Melgoza added that Arjón had worked on and off as a journalist in the past and had been a collaborator for OmniCable, a now-defunct radio station, and that he combined his work as a reporter with delivering meals for a local restaurant.

According to Melgoza, Arjón had a troubled private life and lived in a substance abuse rehabilitation center in San Luis Río Colorado at the time of his death. “He was a good guy, though,” Melgoza told CPJ. “He was very lively, very sociable.”

Arjón reported on a wide range of subjects for A Qué Le Temes, including crime, local politics and the environment. The most recent articles were posted on August 2 and included two short news stories about the arrests of suspects of robberies and theft. Although his disappearance was not widely reported until August 9, CPJ was not able to verify whether he had stopped writing articles after August 2 or whether he disappeared on or shortly after that date.

Melgoza told CPJ that San Luis Río Colorado has recently seen a spike in violence, which he attributed to criminal gangs. “There is a lot of presence of drug traffickers here, lots of shootouts,” he said. According to local newspaper La Tribuna de San Luis, the municipalty had the fifth highest homicide rate in Sonora in 2021.

Mexico is the deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere for journalists. According to CPJ research, at least 11 reporters were killed in the country this year. At least three journalists were murdered in retaliation for their work, and CPJ is investigating eight other killings to determine whether they were work-related.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jennifer Dunham.

At about 2 a.m. on Sunday, July 17, unidentified attackers shot at Haro, founder and editor of the Facebook-based news outlet Las Noticias de la Red, in Ciudad Obregón, in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, according to news reports, a statement by his outlet, and Haro, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

Haro was driving in the area when he heard something hit his car windows; a vehicle then passed him, stopped, and began to turn around, Haro told CPJ, saying, “That’s when I realized that the people inside it had shot at me.”

Haro escaped the scene unharmed, he said. In a short thread on Twitter, the Sonora state prosecutor’s office confirmed Haro’s car had been hit by bullets and said the gunmen drove a white Honda. The office said it had contacted the Federal Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Committed Against Freedom of Expression to determine whether Haro was attacked because of his work.

Earlier in July, radio reporter Susana Carreño survived a knife attack near the coastal resort city of Puerto Vallarta, in the central state of Jalisco, as CPJ documented at the time.

“The attempted shooting of journalist Rubén Haro is outrageous and shocking, weeks after another Mexican journalist barely escaped with her life after a knife attack,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “With 2022 already on track to become the deadliest year for Mexican journalists in recent memory, authorities must do everything in their power to break the cycle of violence and impunity that allows these attacks to continue.”

CPJ called the Sonora prosecutor’s office and the special prosecutor’s office for comment, but no one answered.

Haro told CPJ that he founded Las Noticias de la Red three years ago and serves as its editor and main reporter. He said he had contributed less to the outlet recently, after he joined the municipal government of Nogales, a city at the U.S. border, as a public relations official.

Haro told CPJ that he had never received threats or had been targeted with violence before, saying, “I have no idea why I was targeted. I have never had problems with anyone, nor have we [at Las Noticias de la Red] had any problems as a team.”

Las Noticias de la Red covers a wide range of current events in Ciudad Obregón and its surrounding municipalities, including news about crime and security, according to CPJ’s review of its output.

Just over an hour before the attack, the outlet published two videos about shootouts in Ciudad Obregón, showing how a reporter for the outlet followed emergency services while commenting about the events.

Haro told CPJ that he had reported the attack to the federal attorney general’s office and had received security from municipal police. He added that he was still waiting to hear from the National Guard, Mexico’s elite police corps, for further security.

Haro said he had been in touch with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists after the attack about being incorporated in a protection program. An official with that office, who asked not to be named as he was not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed to CPJ that the agency has established contact with Haro.

Mexico is the deadliest country in the Western Hemisphere for journalists. According to CPJ research, at least three journalists have been murdered for their work this year. CPJ is investigating another eight killings to determine the motive.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On July 1, near the coastal resort city of Puerto Vallarta, in the central Mexican state of Jalisco, unidentified drivers in a gray Jeep Grand Cherokee crashed into Carreño’s vehicle; two men then approached the scene on a motorcycle, forced Carreño at gunpoint to lay down, and stabbed her repeatedly, according to news reports.

Carreño, a reporter for Radio UDG, a broadcaster affiliated with the University of Guadalajara, underwent emergency surgery for injuries to her chest and neck, and was in stable condition as of Wednesday but was not allowed to speak due to her injuries, Radio UDG director Gabriel Torres told CPJ by phone.

“The shocking and brutal attack on Susana Carreño, less than a week after journalist Antonio de la Cruz and his daughter were killed in Tamaulipas, once again shows the Mexican authorities’ utter failure to protect the country’s press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Authorities must protect Carreño and her colleagues by all means necessary, immediately find the culprits of this shameless violence, and determine whether Carreño was attacked for her work.”

Carreño and her co-worker had just entered their vehicle when the attack began, according to Torres and a news report by UGTV, Radio UDG’s television affiliate, which said that the initial car crash was seemingly deliberate.

The attackers used Carreño’s vehicle to escape the crime scene, and the car was found about 10 miles from the scene of the attack, that report said.

Torres said the attack took place minutes after Carreño and her co-worker, whose identity he asked CPJ to keep private for safety concerns, finished a live broadcast of Carreño’s news show “All Voices Count” at Ejido Vallarta, a stretch of communal land near Puerto Vallarta. Carreño has worked for Radio UDG for years, and recently reported on alleged corruption and illegal construction work in the area, Torres said.

Hours after the attack, Jalisco Governor Enrique Alfaro wrote on Twitter describing it as a robbery.

Torres, however, said that while the attackers did steal the journalist and her coworker’s phones and car, “they went straight for [Carreño]; this did not look like a robbery at all.”

According to that UGTV report, Jalisco state authorities later announced that they were investigating whether the attack was related to Carreño’s work, but had not commented publicly on the possible motive or the identity of the attackers.

Torres told CPJ that Carreño had not mentioned receiving any recent threats to her life.

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which provides journalists with protective measures under the auspices of the Federal Interior Ministry, told CPJ that the office was not aware of any recent threats against Carreño or her colleagues at Radio UDG. He added that the mechanism had contacted Carreño in the wake of the attack and was incorporating her into a protection program. That official asked CPJ to remain anonymous, as he was not authorized to speak publicly.

CPJ repeatedly called the Jalisco state prosecutor’s office for comment, but no one answered.

Mexico is the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere. According to CPJ research, at least three journalists have been murdered in direct relation to their work in 2022. CPJ is investigating another eight killings to determine the motive.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

At about 9:15 a.m. on Wednesday, June 29, unidentified attackers shot and killed de la Cruz near his home in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, according to news reports and a statement and press conference by the Tamaulipas state prosecutor’s office.

In that press conference, prosecutor Irving Barrios said that de la Cruz, a reporter for the newspaper Expreso, was shot multiple times while in a car with his daughter. De la Cruz died at the scene and his daughter, who was hit with at least one bullet, underwent emergency surgery, Barrios said.

The attackers fled the scene leaving behind at least four .40 caliber bullet casings, Barrios said; he did not provide any information about the suspected identities of the attackers.

“Mexico’s wave of attacks against the press continues with the shocking killing of Antonio de la Cruz, the latest victim of the cycle of violence and impunity in the deadliest country for the press in the Western Hemisphere,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities must do everything in their power to determine the motive of the killing and arrest the perpetrators and any mastermind.”

The office of the Federal Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Committed Against Freedom of Expression said in a statement that it had opened an investigation into the killing.

De la Cruz worked as a reporter for Expreso for over two decades, the newspaper said in an obituary.

A friend and colleague at the newspaper, who spoke to CPJ on the condition that their name not be disclosed due to safety concerns, said that de la Cruz covered the environment and agriculture for Expreso and did not report on crime, security, or politics. A number of posts on Expreso’s Facebook page carry de la Cruz’s byline, and mainly focus on climate, agriculture, and food prices.

The colleague told CPJ that the staff of Expreso were unaware of any threats against the reporter’s life or any recent threats against the newspaper.

“It took us all by surprise,” the colleague said, adding that de la Cruz was “good-natured, very reserved, and private.”

The colleague noted that de la Cruz was active on Twitter, where he had about 10,000 followers and often critical of the administration of Tamaulipas governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca, as well as municipal politicians in the state.

An official with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which provides protection programs for journalists, told CPJ that de la Cruz had not been incorporated into a federal protection program. The official asked not to be named, as he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

On December 20, 2018, a human head was left in an icebox outside Expreso’s offices, accompanied by a message threatening local journalists. In 2012, a car bomb exploded near the offices of the newspaper.

Tamaulipas is one of Mexico’s most violent states, according to CPJ research and news reports, due to the heavy presence of criminal gangs in the state and its strategic region for the drug trafficking. Last year, at least 526 people were murdered in state, according to news reports.

Mexico is the deadliest country for reporters in the Western Hemisphere. At least three journalists have been killed in the country in 2022 in direct relation to their work. CPJ is investigating another seven killings to determine the motive.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Xun Sero. Photo by Tamara Pearson.

A man has made a documentary about his relationship with his mother. We were at a media conference when he first told me about it. He said his documentary was a way to start conversations about the silenced issue of violence within families and homes and the struggles women face when raising children on their own.

But Xun Sero is a Tzotzil person from Mexico’s southern Chiapas state, and he knows that when many people watch the documentary they will make it about violence within Tzotzil communities, rather than allowing it to speak to broader social issues.

Mamá premiered in Mexico last week, and at the Canadian Hot Docs festival last month. It (see the trailer, with subtitles in English here) shows Sero and his aunties talking to his mother about how she had to run away from home as a child to avoid being married off, and about how his biological, but not-present father raped her.

“Discourse about universality has always come from white men. They are ones who have the universal passport so they can call themselves citizens of the world,” he tells me in an interview. This passport, he explains, gives them easier access to the arts world. But what “makes them think they know all the different cultures?” he asks.

From the novels and art we learn about in school, through to movies and documentaries, only white men have permission to talk about universal themes. Sero argues that they believe that everything belongs to them, that they “know everything,” while original peoples apparently are limited to talking about their own identities.

“There are people who have so much power that they think they have the right to talk for everyone, to impose a single idea of universality on everyone,” Sero says.

The damage of universality

Angela Davis, speaking to a gathering of Ferguson protesters in 2015, made a similar argument. “Any critical engagement with racism requires us to understand the tyranny of the universal. For most of our history the very category ‘human’ has not embraced Black people and people of color. Its abstractness has been colored white and gendered male,” she said.

Ideologies of objectivity, universality, balance and neutrality go beyond the arts to the news, sports, work, education, museums, and most of our lives. Ultimately, they are a defensive code inscribed by the gatekeepers of power in order to maintain an unfair status quo. Anything that comes from the perspective of an oppressed group is dismissed as “political” or “niche” or “unobjective.”

And of course, filmmakers, writers, artists, and musicians who are sidelined into non-universal categories, into our class, race, gender, disability, and sexual identities, are paid much less. We are meant to be grateful for having made it vaguely close to readers and viewers, because most of our community members will not.

In the US in 2020, 74.6% of movie directors were white, and the figure has hovered at the 80 to 90% mark over the past decade. In 2017, in the US, for the hundreds of feature films that made at least US$250,000, 12% of directors were women, and 10% were Black or people of color. Here in Mexico, despite white people making up just 5% of the population, 98% of the main actors on television are white.

Sero described the creation of arts categories as being like a big cake. Those with power “decide the flavor of the cake, the size that goes to each person. And later they say to us, ‘You can join in and we’ll give you a piece of cake.’ But they don’t ask us if we want cake or what flavor we prefer. Instead, they say, ‘This is my cake and I’ll give you a little bit.”

Categories, Sero stressed, should be created by the people who make them up. But instead, they are created in the same way public policy is, from the top down, he argued.

“It’s like, they recognize what art is, but then they say, ‘Over there is Indigenous art’. Basically, looking down on it. So sometimes I do prefer to be called a filmmaker, rather than an Indigenous filmmaker. Because, then I am on the same level as everyone else,” he said, adding, “But if you really have to label what I am, do it based on my culture. My culture is Tzotzil, and I am a descendant of the Mayans. Those are my roots. It’s important to state that and to challenge this idea that the Mayans have disappeared and only exist in museums.”

Similarly in literature, there is a women’s literature category, but there is no man’s category. When women like myself write fiction, we often feature women as some of the main characters, and that is enough to meet the criteria of women’s fiction.

Men, however, often write books with no women bar the trophy female model that the violent and racist hero man wins after defeating all evil (see James Bond for what I mean). So men’s literature does exist, as do men’s documentaries, imperialist films, US-centric films and books, and upper-class content and more.

But these categories of the privileged pass as universal. Perhaps it’s time to start calling them out.

The art theory I was taught at school, for example, was actually just white-European and men’s art, with a bit of Georgia O’Keeffe for “diversity.”

Stereotypes about Mexicans

Films with decent levels of funding that have been made about Mexico, tend to feature drug smuggling and violence. In Mexican television, such criminals are often romanticized, as is domestic violence in Mexican soap operas. But there’s a reason for that.

Money, resources, and time are necessary to produce full-length films. There is a commercial risk in producing content that won’t gain traction. So while some people in Mexico do dare to make different kinds of films, “People tend to copy, or well, they use the word ‘adapt’ … films that do sell well, and that usually means Hollywood,” Sero says.

“I don’t want to make films about drug smuggling, films where there isn’t any hope,” he adds. “I am more interested in topics where the people are resisting, including resisting the drug smugglers, or mining companies.”

But also, “The drug smuggler is always brown, or the murderer or hired killer is brown and that creates a stereotype about what Mexico is.”

Sero also addressed the ‘Indigenous’ label, arguing that for him, it has been associated with racism, discrimination, and fear. “Fear that if you are in some place … and something is lost, you will be blamed for it. The first reaction people have is to blame the Indigenous person. So sorry, but for me, ‘Indigenous’ doesn’t mean native to a place. In my experience, it means robber, killer, wretched person, ungrateful, idiot… that’s what it means.”

At the same, there is a lot of inequality within Mexico. Sero described a filmmaking world where those with formal training feel and act superior to those without, and where there is a lot of competition and “putting on an appearance.” That is something that is easier for people with economic or social privileges to do.

In southern Mexico, “we are 10 or 15 years behind in technology, and that stops people giving workshops or training in such regions.”

US-based filmmaker, Michael Premo noted, “Very often in the documentary space, I’m the only person of color … If you don’t come into this world with a certain amount of social capital it can be very hard to access the gates of power.”

When asked what a better filmmaking world would be like, Sero says he’d like documentaries to be as valued as books are, to be seen as serious sources of information.

“My goal with my documentaries is to transform [society] … not just to ensure more visibility [of oppressed groups],” he says.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Tamara Pearson.

As a major World Trade Organization meeting continued on Tuesday, a top Mexican official called out rich governments for obstructing a pathway to waive patent protections for Covid-19 vaccines and treatments "in order to put the profits of Big Pharma over people's lives."

"Global health is on its deathbed."

Hugo López-Gatell, Mexico's undersecretary of prevention and health promotion, published an opinion piece in Al Jazeera amid negotiations at the WTO's 12th Ministerial Conference in Geneva, Switzerland.

"Global health is on its deathbed," López-Gatell declared, noting that it has been almost two years since India and South Africa proposed a waiver related to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) that "would speedily democratize Covid-19 vaccine and drug production."

Since October 2020, a "damaging new proposal has emerged that is being pushed by the European Union and WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. This proposal would be worse than none at all," he continued, highlighting that "it would actually add more barriers to countries seeking to produce or import generic supplies."

As López-Gatell wrote:

The E.U. plan protects everything that is wrong with the current international health order. It allows big pharmaceutical companies to not share lifesaving technology, keeps numerous countries of the Global South in the begging queue, and pretends that borders can keep out mutations. Their proposed text is nothing more than a PR stunt intended to kill off the possibility of a genuine intellectual property waiver.

[...]

The WTO has failed us during this pandemic and refused to waive its rules that block equitable access to lifesaving technologies. Its rules have prioritized profits over people even in the midst of a pandemic. The E.U., United Kingdom, and Switzerland have blocked the appeals of lower-income country governments as they watched their people die when the vaccine technology existed to save them. Rich countries must give ground and return to a text closer to that originally proposed by South Africa and India. And the WTO must begin to act on behalf of all countries it claims to represent—not on behalf of a few rich countries in the pockets of the pharmaceutical giants.

The People's Vaccine Alliance on Tuesday also slammed the United Kingdom and Switzerland as top officials from each nation publicly defended the draft text and the state of the talks.

"We've got to a text which I think is very good. I think some of the concerns early on have been alleviated," Anne-Marie Trevelyan, the U.K.'s trade minister, told Reuters in Geneva. "We are in the final throes of one word here, one word there. I am hopeful that we will land something that is good."

Meanwhile, Swiss Ambassador Markus Schlagenhof told reporters that "pretending that a sweeping IP waiver would solve the problem does not correspond to reality. IP is not part of the problem but part of the solution."

Anna Marriott, policy lead at the People's Vaccine Alliance and health policy manager at Oxfam, pointed out in a statement that "the U.K. and Switzerland have been major blockers of the TRIPS waiver for 20 months while millions have died without access to Covid-19 vaccines."

"They have repeatedly disrupted negotiations using the amendment process to ensure that any text is difficult to use or implement," she continued. "It would be totally false for rich countries to shift the blame for the current state of TRIPS negotiations onto anybody else."

Echoing López-Gatell's opinion piece, Marriott added:

The text under negotiation is no longer a TRIPS waiver in any meaningful sense. It largely restates the compulsory licensing rights that are already in the TRIPS Agreement, but adds burdensome new obligations that could make it even harder for developing countries to produce and supply vaccines.

If the U.K. and Switzerland are opposed to even this dangerously inadequate text, then they are obviously opposed to any use of TRIPS flexibilities for public health purposes or to ensure equitable access. In short, they are putting Big Pharma's extraordinary profits over people's access to vital medicines.

The alliance and Oxfam released a report last Thursday revealing that nearly 30,000 people have died from Covid-19 per day since India and South Africa kicked off waiver discussions in 2020.

"If the world had acted immediately," Marriott said last week, "then many of these people could still be alive today."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Mexico's leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Monday that he is skipping the Summit of the Americas, following through on his threat to boycott the upcoming meeting if the White House refused to invite officials from all nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The Biden administration's decision to bar the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela from this week's gathering in Los Angeles was made final on Sunday.

Unnamed sources familiar with deliberations between Washington officials and their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts, including those in Mexico, said that U.S. President Joe Biden's long-anticipated move was "based on concerns about the lack of democracy and respect for human rights in the three countries," Bloomberg reported.

However, the White House is reportedly considering a role for Juan Guaidó—an unelected and unpopular right-wing opposition figure who participated in a failed, Trump-backed bid to overthrow elected Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in 2019—at a virtual side event.

Washington does not officially recognize Maduro as the legitimate leader of the South American country even though he was re-elected last year in a contest that U.S. legal observers called fair. Instead, the U.S. recognizes Guaidó as interim president, and Biden previously invited the Venezuelan coup leader to his administration's so-called Summit for Democracy in December.

In addition to Maduro, the U.S. is excluding Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, whose 2021 re-election Biden called fraudulent, from the Summit of the Americas.

According to U.S. officials, the Biden administration decided against inviting a lower-ranking government representative to attend in place of Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who said last month that he would not travel to Los Angeles even if invited due to the White House's "brutal" pressure campaign to make this week's event non-inclusive.

Cuba participated in the 2015 meeting in Panama and the 2018 meeting in Peru, which former U.S. President Donald Trump skipped.

Despite Democratic lawmakers' pleas and Biden's own campaign pledge to reverse Trump's "failed" approach to Cuba—which included implementing more than 200 punitive policies following Obama-era efforts at normalization—the White House has imposed additional sanctions in recent months, intensifying Washington's 60-year embargo on the Caribbean island.

Among other officials in the hemisphere, far-right presidents Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Iván Duque of Colombia are expected to attend the Summit of the Americas, which begins Monday and ends June 10.

Like López Obrador, however, Honduras' socialist President Xiomara Castro will not be making the trip to Los Angeles. Her decision to stay home was announced Sunday.

Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard and Honduran Foreign Minister Eduardo Enrique Reina are expected to fill in, but the absence of multiple Central American presidents is likely to complicate Biden's agenda, which reportedly includes crafting an agreement to reduce and manage undocumented migration as well as discussions of regional economic, health, and food security issues exacerbated by rising inequality and the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis.

Aileen Teague, a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, argued last month that "the Biden administration will lose political capital if it allows its growing tendency to divide the world into 'democratic' friends and 'authoritarian' states to dictate the invitation list for a forum that is much larger than Washington's professed policy objectives."

The stated focus of the Summit of the Americas is to commit to "concrete actions that dramatically improve pandemic response and resilience, promote a green and equitable recovery, bold strong and inclusive democracies, and address the root causes of irregular migration."

John Kirk, professor emeritus of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University in Canada, argued last week that "for a summit that aims to 'dramatically improve pandemic response,' it seems odd to exclude Cuba—the only country in Latin America to have developed its own Covid vaccines, to have sent thousands of medical professionals abroad to help people during the pandemic, and to have fully vaccinated 96% of the population. (Latest figures show fewer than 70 Covid cases per day)."

"In terms of their role abroad, some 5,000 Cuban specialists worked in 42 countries on anti-Covid missions," Kirk continued. "As the prime minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit explained: 'Here in the Caribbean if the support of Cuban doctors was to be removed from the health system of all the countries that are members of Caricom [the Caribbean Community], these would collapse.'"

"Cuba has one of the best public health systems in the Americas," wrote Kirk. "Given these successes, and its program of international medical support, why not at least listen to its successful approach to the pandemic?"

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

Some say Cleopatra died by drinking a poison wolfsbane tincture to avoid being taken prisoner. Thousands of years later, a similar fate met another captive queen: the matriarch of the Prieto wolf pack. When she was snared in April 2020, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services division had already gunned down her mate and killed or captured eight of her heirs. Officials decided to remove alpha female No. 1251 from the Gila National Forest in New Mexico due to her alleged taste for cattle. The next day, she was found dead. Extreme levels of stress hormones had turned her blood toxic, a phenomenon biologists call capture myopathy. She would sooner die than live in a cage.

The death of this endangered Mexican gray wolf completed the eradication of her pack, a vital bloodline in a critically low gene pool. In 2021, there were fewer than 200 Mexican gray wolves in the wild — the highest count ever taken in a recovery program whose gradual upward climb has been forcibly slowed.

Wildlife Services justified the Prieto pack’s destruction by citing livestock depredation reports, which showed that these wolves were prolific cow killers. Yet watchdogs and wolf biologists have long questioned the validity of this data. Now the former director of the agency has come forward to corroborate their suspicions.

Robert “Goose” Gosnell administered Wildlife Services in New Mexico for five years as state director of the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, a job at which he says he inherited an entrenched and systemic corruption problem. “I know some of those depredation [report]s that caused [wolf] removals were illegal,” he told The Intercept, explaining that inspectors had been instructed by superiors to confirm livestock loss incidents as “wolf kills” for ranchers. “My guys in the field were going and rubber-stamping anything those people asked them to.” He described how many also worked second jobs as hunting guides for the same ranchers whose claims they evaluated — a violation of federal ethics codes.

Captive Mexican gray wolves are seen at the Desert Museum in Saltillo, Mexico, on July 2, 2020.

Photo: Julio Cesar Aguilar/AFP via Getty Images

David Parsons, then-leader of the Mexican wolf recovery team at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, and Diane Boyd-Heger, a Mexican wolf biologist, release a female Mexican wolf in the Apache National Forest in Alpine, Ariz., on Nov. 16, 1998.

Photo: Jeff Robbins/AP

“No positive advancement in the Mexican wolf recovery project was ever taken by the initiative of the agencies. It was always forced by litigation.”

Mexican gray wolf pups born in captivity are placed with packs in the wild in Arizona and New Mexico as part of a cross-fostering program.

Photo: The Interagency Field Team/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via AP

“They’re still just approving those depredation investigations left and right. It’s totally wrong.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Spencer Roberts.

The journalists were getting into their car in the parking lot of a convenience store in Cosoleacaque, a town in the eastern state of Veracruz, when an unknown number of assailants approached and shot them at 4 p.m. on Monday, May 9, according to news reports, which cited eyewitnesses.

Mollinedo was the founder and editor of El Veraz, a news outlet that covers southern Veracruz, where García was recently hired as a camera operator, according to those reports. The Veracruz state prosecutor’s office published a statement on Facebook confirming it has opened an investigation.

Mexico is the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere, according to CPJ research. So far in 2022, at least three journalists were killed in direct relation to their work, and CPJ is investigating five other killings. The killings of Mollinedo and García occurred less than a week after the body of journalist Luis Enrique Ramírez was found in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa.

“While Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador repeatedly claimed that there will be no impunity in crimes against journalists, the shocking and brutal slaying of Yessenia Mollinedo and Johana García only emphasizes his government’s inability to prevent deadly violence against the country’s press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “It is impunity that fuels these attacks. Only by relentlessly pursuing a thorough and transparent investigation into the killings of Mollinedo and García and ensuring that their assailants face justice can the Mexican government prove that its words will no longer ring hollow.”

Mollinedo previously covered crime and security in the area for El Veraz but stopped doing so after receiving numerous death threats over the past few years, according to the journalist’s brother Ramiro Mollinedo Falconi, who spoke with CPJ by video call. Most of her articles had been taken down out of concern for her safety.

On April 30, Mollinedo received a death threat while covering events in Cosoleacaque on Children’s Day, a Mexican national holiday. Two men riding a motorcycle “approached her and told her that they knew who she was,” Ramiro Mollinedo told CPJ. Later that day, Mollinedo told her brother that she was followed by two men in a taxi who she described as physically imposing and who stared at her in a way that she perceived as threatening.

García was trained by Mollinedo and given a press card on May 4, the brother added. CPJ could not confirm any further information about García or her journalistic background before joining El Veraz.

Last year, unknown attackers shot at García’s residence, Ramiro Mollinedo told CPJ, adding that he didn’t know further details. CPJ could not confirm the attack or any other threats against the journalist.

El Veraz was founded in 2015 and employed at least nine other reporters and editors at the time of Mollinedo’s death, Ramiro Mollinedo told CPJ, who added that the outlet’s website is no longer online due to financial difficulties.

The outlet’s Facebook page has 20,000 followers and recently posted articles about events and press conferences presided by public officials from the Minatitlán area and protests against alleged abuses of power by local authorities. Most of the recent reports do not carry a byline, and none of the articles posted in the last three months were signed by Mollinedo.

The Veracruz State Commission for Attention to and Protection of Journalists (CEAPP), an autonomous institution of the Veracruz state government, did not immediately reply to a request for comment sent via messaging app. CPJ’s several calls to the office of Veracruz state prosecutor Verónica Hernández were unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

The journalists were getting into their car in the parking lot of a convenience store in Cosoleacaque, a town in the eastern state of Veracruz, when an unknown number of assailants approached and shot them at 4 p.m. on Monday, May 9, according to news reports, which cited eyewitnesses.

Mollinedo was the founder and editor of El Veraz, a news outlet that covers southern Veracruz, where García was recently hired as a camera operator, according to those reports. The Veracruz state prosecutor’s office published a statement on Facebook confirming it has opened an investigation.

Mexico is the deadliest country for journalists in the Western Hemisphere, according to CPJ research. So far in 2022, at least three journalists were killed in direct relation to their work, and CPJ is investigating five other killings. The killings of Mollinedo and García occurred less than a week after the body of journalist Luis Enrique Ramírez was found in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa.

“While Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador repeatedly claimed that there will be no impunity in crimes against journalists, the shocking and brutal slaying of Yessenia Mollinedo and Johana García only emphasizes his government’s inability to prevent deadly violence against the country’s press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “It is impunity that fuels these attacks. Only by relentlessly pursuing a thorough and transparent investigation into the killings of Mollinedo and García and ensuring that their assailants face justice can the Mexican government prove that its words will no longer ring hollow.”

Mollinedo previously covered crime and security in the area for El Veraz but stopped doing so after receiving numerous death threats over the past few years, according to the journalist’s brother Ramiro Mollinedo Falconi, who spoke with CPJ by video call. Most of her articles had been taken down out of concern for her safety.

On April 30, Mollinedo received a death threat while covering events in Cosoleacaque on Children’s Day, a Mexican national holiday. Two men riding a motorcycle “approached her and told her that they knew who she was,” Ramiro Mollinedo told CPJ. Later that day, Mollinedo told her brother that she was followed by two men in a taxi who she described as physically imposing and who stared at her in a way that she perceived as threatening.

García was trained by Mollinedo and given a press card on May 4, the brother added. CPJ could not confirm any further information about García or her journalistic background before joining El Veraz.

Last year, unknown attackers shot at García’s residence, Ramiro Mollinedo told CPJ, adding that he didn’t know further details. CPJ could not confirm the attack or any other threats against the journalist.

El Veraz was founded in 2015 and employed at least nine other reporters and editors at the time of Mollinedo’s death, Ramiro Mollinedo told CPJ, who added that the outlet’s website is no longer online due to financial difficulties.

The outlet’s Facebook page has 20,000 followers and recently posted articles about events and press conferences presided by public officials from the Minatitlán area and protests against alleged abuses of power by local authorities. Most of the recent reports do not carry a byline, and none of the articles posted in the last three months were signed by Mollinedo.

The Veracruz State Commission for Attention to and Protection of Journalists (CEAPP), an autonomous institution of the Veracruz state government, did not immediately reply to a request for comment sent via messaging app. CPJ’s several calls to the office of Veracruz state prosecutor Verónica Hernández were unanswered.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Three journalists were killed within a three-day span this week in Mexico, bringing the toll to 11 so far this year and making Mexico the deadliest country in the world for journalists, behind Ukraine. Most of the murders have gone unsolved. This week journalists across Mexico took to the streets protesting the murder of their colleagues and called for accountability. “A crime against a reporter is a crime against the entire country,” says Jan-Albert Hootsen, Mexico correspondent at the Committee to Protect Journalists, who calls the numbers staggering and unprecedented.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Men who were traveling with Carmelo Cruz Marcos, a 32-year-old Mexican migrant who was shot and killed by a Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona earlier this year, told investigators that the agent and his colleagues appeared to tamper with evidence and concoct a cover story following the fatal incident.

After months of silence in the case, the Cochise County Attorney’s Office announced on Monday that it had insufficient evidence to bring charges against the Border Patrol agent, Kendrek Bybee Staheli, for the February shooting and that the agent’s actions appeared justified under Arizona self-defense laws. Late Wednesday night, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, the lead local agency that investigated the case, released a 28-page file that formed the basis for the prosecutor’s decision.

In an interview with authorities, Staheli described fearing for his life during his encounter with Cruz, claiming that Cruz picked up a rock as he attempted to take him into custody, causing the Border Patrol agent to open fire. Staheli’s partner, who did not witness the fatal encounter, said Staheli was distraught after killing Cruz and asked to be held.

Migrants who Cruz was traveling with, later interviewed by county officials, provided a more chilling version of events, with one claiming that the agents appeared to move Cruz’s body after he was killed and that Staheli’s partner told him things would be fine so long as Staheli said he was scared and that Cruz threatened him with a rock.

The case has sparked outrage in Mexico, with Cruz’s family alleging that the father of three was “assassinated” by U.S. border agents. In an interview last month, an attorney for the family confirmed that they intended to file a lawsuit in response to the killing.

“He would never threaten the Border Patrol, and it is despicable for the Border Patrol to claim that he did.”

“He said then he heard Agent [Staheli] say, ‘You’re in America motherfucker’ and he heard shots fired.”

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Ryan Devereaux.

On the morning of May 5, Ramírez’s body was found near a dirt road in the northwestern city of Culiacán, wrapped in black plastic and with severe head wounds, according to news reports, a statement by the Sinaloa state prosecutor’s office, which is investigating the case, and prosecutor Sara Bruna Quiñónez Estrada, from that office, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview.

Ramírez, 59, was a political columnist for the Culiacán newspaper El Debate, a co-founder of the news website Fuentes Fidedignas, and a contributor to national outlets including La Jornada and El Financiero, according to an obituary published by Fuentes Fidedignas.

Quiñónez told CPJ that her office had opened an investigation into the killing and did not rule out any possible motive, including Ramírez’s work as a journalist.

“The shocking death of Luis Enrique Ramírez extends Mexico’s gruesome streak of killings that have made 2022 already one of the nation’s deadliest on record for the press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “If Mexican authorities want to end this cycle of violence and impunity, they must immediately take credible steps to find Ramírez’s killers and bring them to justice.”

Quiñónez told CPJ that her office was investigating witness reports that a group of people had forced Ramírez into a white vehicle after he left his home at about 3 a.m. on May 5. She said that Ramírez seemingly died of wounds to his head, and did not appear to have been tortured.

In his most recent publications for El Debate, Ramírez covered state and local politics in Sinaloa and Culiacán, including Governor Rubén Rocha, the mayors of Culiacán and Mazatlán, as well as all major political parties in the state congress. As a columnist, he wrote critically about the politicians and parties he covered, including infighting in opposition party PAN and spats between officials.

Most of the articles published on Fuentes Fidedignas in the weeks before Ramírez’s death did not carry a byline, but included coverage of local politics, including press conferences and events held by public officials.

Quiñónez told CPJ that Ramírez had left the state in 2011 for several months due to unspecified threats, but was unable to provide further details, stating that she was not in office at the time and had no knowledge of the matter. She said her office was not aware of any recent threats against Ramírez’s life.

According to CPJ research, at least three journalists have been killed in Mexico this year in direct relation to their work. CPJ is investigating another four killings to determine whether they were related to the victims’ work as journalists.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Jennifer Dunham.

The case hearings will feature testimony from Mexican journalists and relatives of journalists murdered in reprisal for their work and expert witnesses who will provide contextual testimony regarding the situation in Mexico. Members of the international diplomatic corps are expected to be in attendance.

The People’s Tribunals on the Murder of Journalists are a form of alternative justice organized by A Safer World for the Truth, a collaborative project between the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and Free Press Unlimited (FPU). Mexico is one of three countries indicted in 2021, along with Syria and Sri Lanka.

Journalists are encouraged to attend or follow the livestream which will be in Spanish with simultaneous English translation. Representatives of the host organizations are available for interviews or comments on this historically first attempt to use the People’s Tribunals model in defense of press freedoms and murdered journalists. Additional documents are available in both English and Spanish.

What: People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists – Case of Miguel Ángel López Velasco – Oral Arguments

When: April 26-27, 2022

Where: RSVP to press@cpj.org for location details in Mexico or a link to register for the livestream.

Who: Read about the judges
Read about the prosecutors

Media Contact:

press@cpj.org

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Rosario Ybarra de la Garza protesting against a massacre in Palestine. Photograph Source: Eneas de Troya – CC BY 2.0

A giant of a woman in Mexican political life, civil society and human rights advocacy passed away on Easter weekend. The founder of Comité Eureka in 1977, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra was the trailblazing mother of family-led movements demanding answers about loved ones who were forcibly disappeared by government agents.

Retired from public life in recent years, doña Rosario died Saturday, April 16, in her home city of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. She was 95 years old.

As a middle-aged housewife in Monterrey, doña Rosario’s activism began in 1975 after her son Jesús, who was a medical student linked to the guerrilla September 23 Communist League, was captured and disappeared by Mexican security forces.

But to this day, the fates remain unknown of Jesús Piedra Ibarra and hundreds of others detained and disappeared by Mexican police and soldiers during the so-called Dirty War waged by the Mexican government against political opponents and dissidents, armed and unarmed,  between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

Banding together with mothers of other forcibly disappeared young people, doña Rosario and her group burst onto the public stage during the late 1970s, boldly challenging an authoritarian state with public demonstrations, hunger strikes and incessant calls for the safe return of loved ones. Fearless and tenacious, doña Rosario personally confronted Mexican presidents in her search for Jesús and others abducted by the state.

In a 2002 interview with this reporter, doña Rosario credited Comité Eureka’s struggle for obtaining the release of 148 people detained during the Dirty War, including individuals she said told the human rights group of seeing still disappeared people in government jails during their imprisonment.

At the time of the interview, the presidential administration of Vicente Fox had created a special prosecutorial unit to probe the Dirty War and bring charges against human rights violators.

In a fiery assessment, the indomitable activist dismissed the special prosecutor’s office as a “fraud, among many the government has committed against us,” pointing to President Fox’s strong support for the military. Careful to distinguish her organization’s morals from the state’s, doña Rosario declared that Comité Eureka even fought for justice in the cases of some soldiers and police who, in a Machiavellian twist, were forcibly disappeared as well.

“We want to be totally different. We want to end this terrible crime which is forced disappearance, and torture also.”

Though already getting along in her years, doña Rosario was lively, lucid and luminous-a live wire electrifying a sullen landscape and crackling into a long and haunted night. A petite woman who had weathered decades of battles, doña Rosario’s voice still boomed with a forcefulness born from outrage and determination.

Summing up Comité Eureka’s struggle, she said: “We’re militants. We’re fulltime activists. We’re always doing something. We’re always denouncing the government. We’re always working. We can never rest. We say that every day which passes is another day to struggle for the freedom of our children.”

On a broader political level, the movement initiated by doña Rosario and fellow mothers of the disappeared is widely credited for helping prompt the release of 1,500 political prisoners, an amnesty law and electoral reforms during the administration of President López Portillo (1976-82), even as the Dirty War proceeded.

Raising public consciousness, the mothers’ exemplary struggle contributed to the creation of the government’s National Human Rights Commission and official state human rights commissions.

Internationally, the Mexican mothers garnered the support of Amnesty International and U.S. trade unionists, among many others. Meriting recognition, doña Rosario was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Growing up with an extraordinary role model of a mother, doña Rosario’s daughter, Rosario Piedra serves as the current president of the National Human Rights Commission.  On Easter weekend, the home page of the federal agency’s website featured a photo of a younger doña Rosario, lauding her as a “pioneer in the defense of human rights, peace and democracy in Mexico.”

Nowadays, Comité Eureka’s slogan “Vivos se llevaron, Vivos los queremos,” (They were taken alive! We want them back alive!) lives on among the dozens of Mexican organizations and family collectives that struggle against deadly odds to clarify the fates of tens of thousands people forcibly disappeared in Mexico during recent years in the context of the so-called drug war.

Weighing in on the gravity of forced disappearance in Mexico, the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances issued a report this month that exhorted the Mexican state to take stronger measures to eradicate the crime and end impunity.

“Impunity in Mexico is a structural feature that favors the reproduction and cover-up of enforced disappearances and creates threats and anxiety to the victims, those defending and promoting their rights, public servants searching for the disappeared and investigating their cases, and society as a whole,” the Committee said in a press release.

Sparking polemics from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the report contains specific recommendations to the Mexican state.

In 2017, the Mexican Congress finally passed a law against forced disappearance, but as the United Nations report grimly signals, the present succeeds the past in a grotesquely inflated and mutated way.

Regarding the unfinished business of the Dirty War, the López Obrador administration has convened a truth commission to examine human rights violations committed by the Mexican state between 1965 and 1990. The initiative follows previous investigations and legal cases carried out by the Fox government between 2001 and 2006, Mexico’s official National Human Rights Commission, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and the Guerrero State Truth Commission.

While these efforts made strides in uncovering the machinations of the Dirty War and identifying government officials linked to forced disappearance and murder, the handful of legal cases which resulted, including against former President Luis Echeverría (who, ironically, at age 100, has outlived doña Rosario) and deceased, former federal security chief Miguel  Nazar Haro (accused of Jesus Piedra’s disappearance), wound up stalled by lawyers and blocked in Mexican courts, while hundreds of victims remained disappeared and their relatives in tormented suspense.

Augmenting her street activism, doña Rosario was a political trailblazer. In 1982, she became the first woman to run for the presidency of Mexico, representing the small Revolutionary Workers Party. Never one to quit, she mounted a second, unsuccessful run for the nation’s highest post in 1988. Separately, however, the human rights defender twice managed to gain a seat in the lower house of the Mexican Congress and later served two terms in the Mexican Senate between 2006 and 2012.

Among her many causes, doña Rosario voiced support for the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas state, protested against electoral fraud during the presidential elections of 2006 and 2012, and served on a commission to resolve (unsuccessfully) the forced disappearances of two leaders of the guerrilla Popular Revolutionary Army in Oaxaca in 2007.

Invited by the relatives of disappeared and murdered young women, she once traveled to Ciudad Juarez to learn about the femicides terrorizing the northern Mexican border city. In her 2002 interview, doña Rosario characterized the gender violence as “another terrible crime…it seems to me a tremendous cruelty, extreme sadism.”

In 2012 doña Rosario and her comrades witnessed the opening of a museum in Mexico City, The House of Indomitable Memory, a space dedicated to exhibiting stories of the Dirty War and forced disappearance.

The death of doña Rosario was huge news in Mexico over the long Easter weekend. Stories, remembrances and commentaries gushed forth from the nation’s major media outlets. At an Easter day session, the lower chamber of the Mexican Congress honored a former colleague and a national legend with a minute of applause.

“We will always remember the profound love for the sons and daughters and the solidarity with those who suffer for the disappearance of their loved ones,” President López Obrador said in a statement posted on his website, recalling that his own mother cast her vote for doña Rosario back when the Monterrey mother ran for the nation’s office.

After she was awarded a civic medal by the Mexican Senate in 2019, doña Rosario turned it over to López Obrador with the condition that she would accept the prestigious award back when the truth was known about what happened to her son Jesús and the other forcibly disappeared young people of his generation. Unfortunately, doña Rosario never lived to see that day.

In an editorial on doña Rosario’s death, La Jornada news daily referenced the medal episode. According to the newspaper’s editors, “…undoubtedly, the greatest homage that the Mexican state could render to one of its most illustrious citizens rests with locating the 96,000 people who remain disappeared, and in undertaking all the dispositions within its reach to eradicate this ill.”

With about 100 people in attendance, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra was buried in Monterrey on Easter Day, 2022.

Quoted in Proceso magazine’s web news service, a survivor of forced disappearance said she was delivered into the world twice, the second time by doña Rosario, whom she considered her mother.

“There is much left for (López Obrador’s) government to do,” Claudia Piedra, doña Rosario’s youngest daughter, was quoted in La Jornada. “It has done a lot, but there can’t be a true transformation if the problem of the disappeared continues.”

Gathered around her grave, doña Rosario’s relatives and friends shouted, “Rosario lives, the struggle continues!”

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Kent Paterson.

Mexican lawmakers this week passed legislation to nationalize lithium, a mineral needed to manufacture rechargeable batteries for electric vehicles and other devices.

Mexico's Senate approved the mining reform bill by a margin of 87 to 20, with 16 abstentions, on Tuesday, one day after it was advanced by the country's lower house of Congress.

The bill recognizes lithium reserves as federal property and gives democratically accountable lawmakers rather than profit-maximizing multinational corporations control over a resource that has been dubbed "white gold" and "the new oil." President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who also goes by the nickname AMLO, is expected to sign it into law as soon as this week.

Paweł Wargan of Progressive International celebrated the bill's passage by Mexico's Chamber of Deputies, asserting that "the arteries of imperial extraction are being severed before our eyes."

"Lithium belongs to Mexicans, not to transnational corporations," lawmaker Hamlet Amalguer said, according to Telesur, which reported that "150,000 hectares of land were granted to private companies for exploiting this metal during President Enrique Peña-Nieto's administration (2012-2018)."

The bill provides for the creation of a state-run enterprise that will maintain exclusive rights over lithium mining.

According to the Associated Press, "Only one lithium mine in Mexico, operated by a Chinese firm, is anywhere close to starting production. It was not clear if that mine in northern Mexico would be taken over by the government."

As Bloomberg reported:

At his morning press conference Tuesday, AMLO said Mexico will review existing contracts for the extraction of lithium, which has grown increasingly important as a component in rechargeable batteries including for electric cars. Mexico has yet to produce lithium commercially, but previous governments granted permits, including to Bacanora Lithium Plc, which was later bought by China's Ganfeng Lithium Co.

López Obrador sought the measure on lithium mining after a broader proposal by his center-left Morena party to increase government control of the nation's electricity system failed Sunday to garner the two-thirds majority needed for constitutional changes.

The president described the right-wing opposition's refusal to support his initiative to overhaul the country's power system as "an act of treason against Mexico committed by a group of legislators who, instead of defending the interests of the people... became outright defenders of foreign companies."

López Obrador has long championed resource sovereignty, but it remains unclear if his effort to take advantage of Mexico's abundance of lithium—instrumental to green energy storage, a key component of global decarbonization efforts—will include significant exemptions.

Although most of the planet's lithium is located in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile, the United Kingdom-based Bacanora Lithium Plc identified the world's largest lithium deposit in Mexico's northern Sonora state in 2018, uncovering more than 243 million tons of the key metal. 

China's Ganfeng Lithium Co., which supplies Tesla with the mineral for its electric vehicle batteries, quickly purchased all mining concessions held by Bacanora.

When López Obrador's nationalization plans were made public in October, "the government scrambled to assure firms with active lithium mining permits in Mexico that they would be exempt from any new legislation," Al Jazeera reported last year. "That, in turn, was interpreted to apply to Ganfeng, because construction had started on the Bacanora Sonora Lithium deposit in February."

In December, "Mexican regulators made good on that theoretical grandfather clause and without fanfare gave the green light to Ganfeng's takeover of Bacanora's Sonora lithium mining concessions," the news outlet noted. "The official exemption illustrates that AMLO's government is willing to concede some of Mexico's natural resources to a foreign economic power. It also reveals what analysts see as a vector of tension between AMLO's quest for Mexican strategic mineral sovereignty and the much larger geopolitical race surrounding lithium."

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

This content originally appeared on openDemocracy RSS and was authored by Amigzaday López Beltrán.

This headline, and many others like it indicate Mexico will remain in drug cartel hell until it decides it’s essential to pay living wages across the entire country — an impossible change because Big Capital has continued to absolutely oppose that. The evil of non-living wages is global, of course.

So long as millions and millions of working Mexicans continue to live under the tyranny of seven to ten dollars a day, which is Mexico’s “legal” minimum wage, a number of them will keep on taking a chance on crime.

Working people in Mexico have families to feed but often can’t do that fully. We’re talking about the basic necessities of food, medicine, housing, and school for their kids. But they all have smart phones or know someone who does, so they’re well aware they’re getting screwed and they’re angry.

Besides more money — never mind that it’s blood money — a life of crime for some people may also promise an imagined payback against the unfair and racist system they’ve known first hand.  That said, I do not defend making immoral choices.

But the fact is, the working poor mostly have no future and they know it. They see their children also having no future unless they make significant changes, so a life of crime can appear to be an option for some who do play by the rules, keep working hard, and still can’t ever make ends meet. Month after month, year after year it stays the same. Again, this is a global problem.

In the United States, for instance, in a lot of states once a felon you’re always a felon and many non-violent offenses of small amounts of drug possession can make you a felon.

Being a felon often means you can’t vote, you can’t get public housing, you can’t get food stamps if you’re broke, and getting a job is really hard because employers will ask you the dreaded question “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”  If you say yes, you’re likely not getting the job.  And if you say no and then they find out you lied, not only you’re not getting the job but if you have one you’re getting fired.

So what are felons to do?  Never mind most of them are also saddled with jail debt which can and does land them right back to prison for non-payment. Phone calls in jail are very costly, as are administrative fees, previously unpaid fines now growing under huge interest rates, and so on. Any arrangements you can manage to make from behind bars for your appeal will cost you a lot. All this snowballs for people in jail and makes their ex-convict lives outside very hard.

Ex-convicts and undocumented workers have some travails in common. Consider this. Under current United States immigration law, where guidelines for what’s called Prosecutorial Discretion (PD) are still changing and not yet fully resolved, many immigrants’ cases can be either dismissed (cannot get work authorization) or administratively closed (they can get work authorization).

Sometimes the side of government chooses to push the non-argument of, Well, since you, the defendant, have somehow managed to hustle a working existence illegally in this country for the last ten years, you can be free to continue doing so after we dismiss your case. We don’t care.

To which a good judge will respond with  No!  I will oppose dismissing this defendant’s case, forcing him to continue a life where he will need to keep working under the table.  Our courts are better than that.  They’re better than officially putting a defendant in a position where he’ll have to break the law in order for him and his family to survive. That makes no sense to me. Therefore, I will move instead to temporarily administratively close this case so this defendant can get a work permit and work legally while this court waits for the US government to produce their long-overdue final guidelines on this matter.  At that point in time this court will reconvene. Government counsel is free to appeal my decision.

Good judges do actually dispense justice when they go to work.

The immigration system in the US will remain in need of serious reform so long as it remains a profit-making system for businesses that benefit directly from cheap immigrant labor.  Big Capital prefers to nibble at the edges of the problem without really changing the system too much. Talking about lives of crime, what about corporate lives of white-collar crime?

Newscasters and pundits in corporate media constantly talk about capitalism and democracy in the same sentence unquestioningly.  Capitalism and democracy not only don’t go together, they often exclude each other.  A lot has to change before a society can functionally bring those two terms together. We are still not there in the United States or in Mexico.

It’s clear not everyone can be like New Zealand, Finland, Norway and so on, places where capitalistic societies function decently even when the means of production remain privately owned.  Those advanced societies show us that more humane societal choices are also possible.

Drug cartels have Mexico in their grip irremediably because they bring the promise of more breathing money to people suffocating economically. So the working poor and the alienated join cartels knowing blood money is a certainty, but their survival situation is desperate enough and demoralizing enough that many keep taking their chances with the devil. They lose and the devil wins.

With nineteen people gunned down and many more wounded, that was some cockfighting party, huh?

It’s just another day in the world where savage economic inequality rages on.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Oscar Zambrano.

“For three days last week, case numbers were reported at over 20,000 … today’s case number is up a bit [on Monday] but that is to be expected as testing rates are always a bit low over the weekend,” she said.

The Ministry of Health reported 17,148 new cases of covid-19 in the community and the reported deaths were over a period of 10 days, taking the covid-19 related death toll to 303.

• READ MORE: Covid-19 update: 34 further deaths, 17,148 new community cases and 842 people in hospital
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One person was in their 30s, one person was in their 50s, five were in their 60s, nine were in their 70s, seven in their 80s and 11 were in their 90s.

Seventeen were male and 17 were female.

The reduction in case numbers has been most pronounced in Auckland. Cases have fallen from just under 4300 reported cases last Monday to 2300 yesterday.

Dr McElnay said while numbers overall were dropping, regional spikes were occurring.

The so-called “Mexican wave of cases” is being reflected the most in Canterbury, she said. “We’re seeing those numbers roll down the country.”

Overall, numbers were expected to continue to decrease over the week.

Rest of NZ lagging
The only district health boards (DHBs) with increases in numbers are Whanganui, MidCentral, Taranaki and the South Island DHBs.

“That probably tells us that the rest of New Zealand is about a couple of weeks behind Auckland,” Dr McElnay said.

“It gives us a signal of where we hope to be in the next couple of weeks.”

“We are optimistic that in the next couple of weeks the rest of the country will follow the same pattern as Auckland and we will see a drop in hospitalisation and a decrease in pressure on our health services.”

Dr McElnay said that once a person tested positive for covid-19, they should not test again for 28 days.

If you develop new symptoms after that, then test. If you test positive, you are considered a new case and you must isolate again.

This weekend was the start of eased restrictions which the government announced early last week.

Meanwhile, more than 1300 doses of Novavax’s covid-19 vaccine, which has been available since March 14 for those who cannot have the Pfizer jab or would prefer not to, have so far been administered.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

On Tuesday, March 15, unidentified attackers shot and killed Linares, the co-founder and editor of news website Monitor Michoacán, at his home in the central city of Zitácuaro, according to news reports.

Those reports, citing unnamed police sources, said that the journalist was shot at least eight times and died before he could be taken to a hospital.

The Michoacán state prosecutor’s office confirmed the killing via Twitter, and said that it had opened an investigation under its protocols for crimes against journalists.

“Words cannot describe the shock at Armando Linares’ brutal killing, which continues Mexico’s staggering record of journalist slayings in 2022,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “In light of the alarming frequency with which journalists are being killed, Mexican authorities have no choice but to acknowledge the rampant cycle of impunity and violence that fuels these attacks.”

CPJ repeatedly contacted Nicolás Maldonado, who coordinates regional prosecutors for the Michoacán state prosecutor’s office, via messaging app for comment, but did not receive any replies.

Linares co-founded Monitor Michoacán several years ago, and served as the outlet’s editor and principal author, publishing articles on its website and Facebook page, where it has about 100,000 followers, Linares told CPJ in a January 31 phone interview.

In late 2021, the outlet published a number of articles accusing former Zitácuaro Mayor Carlos Herrera and former Michoacán Governor Silvano Aureoles of corruption, embezzlement, and influence trafficking. CPJ was unable to find contact information for Herrera or Aureoles to request comment.

The outlet also published articles on alleged corruption and extortion by local law enforcement in Zitácuaro, and accused municipal police in Zitácuaro of changing information about people arrested on drug possession charges.

CPJ called the Zitácuaro municipal police for comment, but no one answered.

Monitor Michoacán also reported that anonymous people had accused Linares of having ties to the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, a criminal group that, according to news reports, has been involved in a series of killings and shootings in the Zitácuaro area. Linares denied having any such ties when he spoke to CPJ in January.

Linares is the second Monitor Michoacán staff member killed in 2022. On January 31, unknown assailants shot and killed 55-year old Roberto Toledo, who worked as a camera operator and video editor, as well as an occasional writer for the outlet’s website.

On the day of Toledo’s killing, Linares published a brief video statement on the outlet’s Facebook page, in which he said that he and Monitor Michoacán had received death threats over the outlet’s reporting on alleged corruption by state and municipal authorities. He did not elaborate on the nature of threats.

During three phone calls with CPJ in the days after Toledo’s killing, Linares reiterated that he had received death threats over his reporting, but did not provide any more details about the threats, citing concerns for his safety.

He confirmed to CPJ that he had been in contact with the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, which operates under the auspices of the federal Interior Secretariat and provides reporters under threat with protective measures.

An official from the mechanism told CPJ that Linares was in the process of being enrolled in a federal protection program, but did not elaborate on what protective measures were planned for his case. The official requested not to be named, as they were not authorized to comment on the matter.

Linares is the seventh Mexican journalist killed in less than three months in Mexico, according to CPJ data. CPJ is investigating six of those cases, including Linares’, to determine whether journalism was the motive; CPJ has confirmed that reporter Heber López Vásquez was killed for his work in February.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

On March 4, Muñiz’s body was found in Los Olivos, a neighborhood in the city of Fresnillo in the central state of Zacatecas, according to news reports.

His body was found in a taxicab with gunshot wounds; in addition to working as a reporter for the local news website Testigo Minero and other local outlets, Muñiz made a living as a taxi driver, those reports said.

In a statement, the Zacatecas state prosecutor’s office said that it had opened an investigation into the killing and was implementing special protocols used for attacks on members of the press. That statement did not provide details on the motive for the attack or identify any suspects.

At least five other journalists have been killed in Mexico since January 1, according to CPJ research and reporting. CPJ is investigating to confirm whether those killings were work-related.

“Mexico continues its staggering streak of journalist killings in 2022 with the brutal slaying of Juan Carlos Muñiz—a stark example of the extreme risk that local reporters covering politics and crime face on a daily basis,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “The Mexican government’s inaction allows the impunity that fuels these attacks to fester and cement its abysmal status as the hemisphere’s deadliest country for journalists.”

CPJ repeatedly called the Zacatecas prosecutor’s office for comment, but no one answered.

Muñiz contributed to Testigo Minero, a website that covers local news in the Fresnillo area, under the pseudonyms “Rigoberto” and “El TX,” according to two statements by the outlet, which said the latter name was a reference to his job as a taxi driver.

Testigo Minero’s recent news publications include political reporting and coverage of crime and security issues in Fresnillo, according to CPJ’s review of its website. Many of its stories are published under the “Testigo Minero” byline, and CPJ was unable to immediately locate recent articles attributed to Muñiz on the outlet’s website or Facebook page. CPJ called Testigo Minero for comment, but no one answered.

In its statements, Testigo Minero said that Muñiz also worked as a volunteer firefighter and reported for several other media organizations in the region, but did not identify those outlets by name. Neither statement said whether the journalist had received any threats related to his work.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Erik Crouch.

Rosa Jimenez is expected to be released after more than 17 years in prison for a crime she did not commit. Today Judge Karen Sage issued a decision in Ms. Jimenez’s habeas petition granting her relief based on false forensic testimony and ineffective assistance of counsel at her 2005 trial for the murder of a 21-month-old child in her care.

In her decision, Judge Sage stated that “There was no crime committed here … Ms. Jimenez is innocent,” and added, “I cannot give Ms. Jimenez justice today but hopefully I can give her the inalienable right that she has been deprived of for far too long — her freedom.”

Rosa Jimenez holding her daughter Brenda. (Image: Courtesy of Rosa Jimenez)

Ms. Jimenez has always maintained her innocence and has said the child’s death was a tragic accident and not murder. Top pediatric airway specialists testified that the medical findings are supportive of an accidental death and Ms. Jimenez has been wrongfully convicted of a crime that never occurred.

The judge further ordered Ms. Jimenez be released from prison due to urgent health and safety concerns. Ms. Jimenez is suffering from advanced Stage 4 kidney disease and is particularly vulnerable to fatal complications from COVID-19.

The Honorable Karen Sage of the 299th District Travis County Trial Court granted habeas relief and ordered the release of Ms. Jimenez. 

Rosa Jimenez and her Innocence Project attorney Vanessa Potkin will make a brief statement upon her release on Wednesday, January 27, 2021. Ms. Jimenez’s release is expected at some point throughout the remainder of the day barring any unexpected delays.       

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The post President-elect Joe Biden introduces five top picks for his new administration; Public health officials urge Mexican Catholic residents to stay home from Guadalupe celebrations appeared first on KPFA.

This content originally appeared on KPFA - The Pacifica Evening News, Weekdays and was authored by KPFA.

Rosa Jimenez, an Innocence Project client, was convicted of murder in 2005 for the death of a 21-month-old who choked on wadded up paper towels while he was in her care. But several pediatric experts have found that the child’s death was consistent with accidental choking. Jimenez has always maintained her innocence and, since her trial, experts and judges have also concluded that she is likely innocent.

There was no evidence of abuse or criminal behavior in the child’s death. 

In October 2019, about 14 years after Jimenez’s initial trial, a district judge ruled that Jimenez was denied a fair trial and overturned her murder conviction. He ordered a new trial during which reliable medical experts would be able to testify that the child had died from accidental choking. The decision reinforced the recommendation of a magistrate judge, issued in September 2018, and gave the prosecution until February 25, 2020, to retry or release Jimenez. 

But Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore has indicated that she intends to fight to prevent a jury from hearing all of the evidence at a retrial. She has instructed Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office to appeal the decision — a process that could take years. Jimenez is presently suffering from Stage 4 kidney disease and, as long as she is incarcerated, treatment options are limited. A long, drawn-out appeal process would keep her in prison while her health deteriorates further​. 

Advocates are ​calling for Moore to drop the appeal and dismiss the charges against Jimenez so she can go home.

If she is released, Jimenez wants to move back to Mexico to live with her mother, be reunited with her two children, and seek adequate medical treatment. 

But if she remains in custody, she will never be considered for the kidney transplant she needs, said Vanessa Potkin, Jimenez’s attorney and the Innocence Project’s director of post-conviction litigation.

Here’s what you need to know about her case: 

1. Pediatric experts from the nation’s leading children’s hospitals say there is no evidence suggesting the child was murdered, and confirm the evidence that shows the little boy accidentally choked. When Jimenez noticed the child was choking, she immediately tried to remove the blockage, and rushed to a neighbor’s house to call 911 when she was unable to. The child was ultimately resuscitated, but the lack of oxygen resulted in severe brain damage, and he died a few months later.
2. The Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore relied on scientifically-unfounded medical opinions and used racist tropes to convince a jury to convict Jimenez, who is originally from Mexico. Her appointed attorney failed to put forth a meaningful defense in response, and she was sentenced to 99 years in prison. 
3. At the time of her trial in 2005, Jimenez’s defense was woefully inadequate. Her attorney called one expert who was ill-equipped and unqualified to rebut any of the state’s faulty claims. He was also fully discredited on cross-examination, at one point telling the prosecution to “go fuck themselves,” among several other explosive and harmful tirades. The state court habeas judge who recommended that Jimenez receive a new trial noted that in his “30 years as a licensed attorney, [and] 20 years in the judiciary, [he had] never seen such unprofessional and biased conduct from any witness, much less a purported expert” and the expert’s testimony left Jimenez’s case worse off than if she’d had no expert at all. 
4. Four Texas judges and have concluded that Rosa is likely innocent (see findings: Hon. Jon Wisser, Hon. Charlie Baird,  Hon Andrew Austin, and Hon. Lee Yeakel).
5. Jimenez’s children were taken from her. At the time of her arrest, she was a married mom of a 1-year-old girl who was still nursing and seven months pregnant with her son. She gave birth to him in prison and he was immediately taken from her. Both of her children were raised in foster care and are now teenagers.
6. “If the state drags this out it will turn into a death sentence for Ms. Jimenez,” said Vanessa Potkin, Jimenez’s attorney and the Innocence Project’s director of post-conviction litigation. Jimenez is in desperate need of a kidney transplant but if she remains in custody, she will never be considered for one. 
7. Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore has the power to free Jimenez, but instead has refused to re-examine the case and consider the opinions of the four judges who have said Jimenez is likely innocent. Moore is supporting the Attorney General’s appeal and is vowing to retry Jimenez.