The silent massacre of journalists in the land of narcos

Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen are not the countries most at risk for those who provide information. Yet in war scenarios there is always someone who would not want to be told what is happening. Journalists risk, and also a lot, in democratic Mexico, the largest country in Central America. Since 2000, 142 reporters (131 men and 11 women) have been killed due to their research work and their stories of corruption, drug trafficking and abuses of all kinds committed by narcos in league with officers and army soldiers and agents. and police leaders, with governors and mayors. And the number is approximated by default and takes into account only the certainties about the motive. But other killings and other disappearances of journalists are being further investigated precisely to place them in a specific context. With many difficulties, linked to the resistance of the police, too often in the pay of criminal cartels and therefore interested in not revealing any detail.

After years of work, Isabel Hernandez published "La terra dei narcos" in 2014, the map of the drug cartels that have taken over Mexico for a few decades and their contacts with state leaders, in particular with Genaro Garcia Luna , for a long time the most powerful head of the federal police and the country's security. In 2019, the man was arrested in Miami on corruption charges: he had pocketed millions of dollars from the Sinaloa Cartel. In practice, Garcia Luna had allowed El Chapo (Joaquim Guzman Loera) to grow his trade while he was in charge of arresting or killing the leaders of other organizations, thus giving the Sinaloans the green light. Hernandez wrote this and more in the book starting to receive heavy threats. They had killed her father when she was a young girl and the police did not investigate the murder because the family did not pay the officers. Now the journalist, writes for the magazine "Proceso" and lectures at the University of Berkeley in California, lives under guard with her husband and their three children. But it is alive.

Diego Osorno is another young Mexican journalist who has told and continues to tell the horror of a forgotten war. Yes, a war. Every year Mexico has an infinity of deaths killed: last year the quota was exceeded 35,000, that is to say just under 100 per day. Considering the population, it would be as if in Italy there were 50 murders every single day. And in the unedifying ranking of the most violent cities on the planet, Mexico has five in the top 10 and four in the top 5 (in third place is Caracas, Venezuela). Ozorno wrote about "Los Zetas", certainly the most heinous and brutal cartel ever known and which has helped to raise the level of violence in the country. Who hasn't seen the horrendous spectacle of lifeless bodies hanging from road bridges or dismembered with limbs and heads thrown into multiple city streets?

"Los Zetas" once seq uestrato a young blogger from Anonymous, guilty of writing stories of drug trafficking, with the intent to torture and kill him. But friends of the hacker group threatened the Zetas that if they got one hair wrong they would blog the reports of the criminals at all political levels. A couple of hours later the boy was able to hug his family again. Osorno held out, did not let himself be intimidated and continued to denounce what was happening in northern Mexico on the border with the United States. He too had to give up and accept protection in order to continue his work as a reporter.

Hernandez and Osorno are two examples, not the only ones, in a battered country that does not want, probably cannot, free itself from an increasingly invasive and increasingly powerful crime. Mexico has extraordinary resources, raw materials that are lacking elsewhere, yet it cannot change its status but remains hostage to the drug traffickers who now only have the problem of laundering mountains of dirty money and silencing anyone who tries to hinder them or, even, to report them. Many newspapers, dailies and periodicals have suffered attacks and have been forced to close. Others have decided to limit the publication of news of massacres and crimes of the "drug war" to a minimum to avoid retaliation. Limits to the freedom of the press that not everyone knows and that place Mexico in 144th place in the world rankings