Mexicos Resilient Journalists

In recent decades, Mexico has been one of the most dangerous democracies for journalists. Their coverage of the war on drugs, abuses of power, and human rights violations has led to harassment, threats, and violence by powerful cartels and corrupt officials. This book provides a ground-level view of how Mexican journalists have navigated this perilous environment, offering insight into how they protect themselves while reporting on the most critical and sensitive subjects. Based on in-depth interviews with reporters, editors, activists, and officials, Mexico’s Resilient Journalists examines the strategies that media workers have employed in pursuit of both personal safety and the public interest. Julieta Brambila argues that Mexican journalists have developed innovative forms of resilience, highlighting their power and agency amid violence, censorship, and intimidation. She considers how journalists have banded together to develop coping mechanisms, protect each other, and raise public awareness. These resilient newsmakers have adapted to adversity by redefining their professional values and practices, rethinking their surroundings, and reassessing their role. Brambila also evaluates how various media organizations have learned from incidents of violence and changed their policies to better protect their reporters. Shedding new light on defense of the freedom of the press in Mexico, this book offers crucial lessons for other countries seeing a rise in threats to independent journalism.

Mott KTA Journalism and Mass Communication Research Award, Kappa Tau Alpha Tankard Book Award, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Knudson Latin America Prize, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Since 2000, more than 150 journalists have been killed in Mexico. Today the country is one of the most dangerous in the world in which to be a reporter. In Surviving Mexico, Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly examine the networks of political power, business interests, and organized crime that threaten and attack Mexican journalists, who forge ahead despite the risks. Amid the crackdown on drug cartels, overall violence in Mexico has increased, and journalists covering the conflict have grown more vulnerable. But it is not just criminal groups that want reporters out of the way. Government forces also attack journalists in order to shield corrupt authorities and the very criminals they are supposed to be fighting. Meanwhile some news organizations, enriched by their ties to corrupt government officials and criminal groups, fail to support their employees. In some cases, journalists must wait for a “green light” to publish not from their editors but from organized crime groups. Despite seemingly insurmountable constraints, journalists have turned to one another and to their communities to resist pressures and create their own networks of resilience. Drawing on a decade of rigorous research in Mexico, González de Bustamante and Relly explain how journalists have become their own activists and how they hold those in power accountable.

A harrowing and unforgettable look at reporting in Mexico, one of the world's most dangerous countries to be a journalist In 2017, Mexico edged out Iraq and Syria as the deadliest country in the world in which to be a reporter, with at least fourteen journalists killed over the course of the year. The following year another ten journalists were murdered, joining the almost 150 reporters who have been killed since the mid-2000s in a wave of violence that has accompanied Mexico's war on drugs. In Killing the Story, award-winning journalist and filmmaker Témoris Grecko reveals how journalists are risking their lives to expose crime and corruption. From the streets of Veracruz to the national television studios of Mexico City, Grecko writes about the heroic work of reporters at all levels—from the local self-trained journalist, Moises Sanchez, whose body was found dismembered by the side of a road after he reported on corruption by the state's governor, to high-profile journalists such as Javier Valdez Cárdenas, gunned down in the streets of Sinaloa, and Carmen Aristegui, battling the forces attempting to censor her. In the vein of Charles Bowden's Murder City and Anna Politskaya's A Russian Diary, Killing the Story is a powerful memorial to the work of Grecko's lost colleagues, which shows a country riven by brutality, hypocrisy, and corruption, and sheds a light on how those in power are bent on silencing those determined to reveal the truth and bring an end to corruption.

Since 2000, more than 150 journalists have been killed in Mexico. Today the country is one of the most dangerous in the world in which to be a reporter. In Surviving Mexico, Celeste González de Bustamante and Jeannine E. Relly examine the networks of political power, business interests, and organized crime that threaten and attack Mexican journalists, who forge ahead despite the risks. Amid the crackdown on drug cartels, overall violence in Mexico has increased, and journalists covering the conflict have grown more vulnerable. But it is not just criminal groups that want reporters out of the way. Government forces also attack journalists in order to shield corrupt authorities and the very criminals they are supposed to be fighting. Meanwhile some news organizations, enriched by their ties to corrupt government officials and criminal groups, fail to support their employees. In some cases, journalists must wait for a “green light” to publish not from their editors but from organized crime groups. Despite seemingly insurmountable constraints, journalists have turned to one another and to their communities to resist pressures and create their own networks of resilience. Drawing on a decade of rigorous research in Mexico, González de Bustamante and Relly explain how journalists have become their own activists and how they hold those in power accountable.

Since the 2000 elections toppled the PRI, over 150 Mexican journalists have been murdered. Failed assassinations and threats have silenced thousands more. Such high levels of violence and corruption question one of the fundamental assumptions of modern societies, that democracy and press freedom are inextricably intertwined. In this collection historians, media experts, political scientists, cartoonists, and journalists reconsider censorship, state-press relations, news coverage, and readership to retell the history of Mexico’s press.

Newsrooms in Conflict examines the dramatic changes within Mexican society, politics, and journalism that transformed an authoritarian media institution into many conflicting styles of journalism with very different implications for deepening democracy in the country. Using extensive interviews with journalists and content analysis spanning more than two decades, Sallie Hughes identifies the patterns of newsroom transformation that explain how Mexican journalism was changed from a passive and even collusive institution into conflicting clusters of news organizations exhibiting citizen-oriented, market-driven, and adaptive authoritarian tendencies. Hughes explores the factors that brought about this transformation, including not only the democratic upheaval within Mexico and the role of the market, but also the diffusion of ideas, the transformation of professional identities and, most significantly, the profound changes made within the newsrooms themselves. From the Zapatista rebellion to the political bribery scandals that rocked the nation, Hughes's investigation presents a groundbreaking model of the sociopolitical transformation of a media institution within a new democracy, and the rise and subsequent stagnation of citizen-focused journalism after that democracy was established.

In an era of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and bigotry, each of these 13 stories illuminates the issues affecting the Mexican community and shows the breadth of a frequently stereotyped population. Dreamers and their allies, those who care about immigration justice, and anyone interested in the experience of Mexicans in the US will respond to these stories of Mexican immigrants (some documented, some not) illuminating their complex lives. Regardless of status, many are subjected to rights violations, inequality, and violence--all of which existed well before the Trump administration--and have profound feelings of being unwanted in the country they call home. There's Monica Robles, the undocumented mother of three US citizens who is literally confined to a strip of territory between two checkpoints--one at the Mexico border and one twenty-seven miles north of the border. We meet Jeanette Vizguerra, who came to symbolize the sanctuary movement when she took shelter in a Denver church in February 2017 to avoid deportation. (Later that year, Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.) There's Daniel Rodriguez, the first undocumented immigration lawyer in Arizona to successfully obtain a license to practice. Alberto Mendoza, who suffered persecution as a gay man for years, in 2013 founded Honor 41, a national Latina/o LGBTQ organization that promotes positive images of their community. After crossing the border illegally with his mother as a child, Al Labrada later joined the military to get on a path to citizenship; in March 2017, he was promoted to captain in the Los Angeles Police Department. These and eight other stories will broaden how you think about Mexicans in America.

With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows. Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN Promotes Veering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernández and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio González Rodríguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.

For more than a century, Mexican American journalists used their presses to voice socio-historical concerns and to represent themselves as a determinant group of communities in Nuevo MŽxico, a particularly resilient corner of the Chicano homeland. This book draws on exhaustive archival research to review the history of newspapers in these communities from the arrival of the first press in the region to publication of the last edition of Santa FeÕs El Nuevo Mexicano. Gabriel MelŽndez details the education and formation of a generation of Spanish-language journalists who were instrumental in creating a culture of print in nativo communities. He then offers in-depth cultural and literary analyses of the texts produced by los periodiqueros, establishing them thematically as precursors of the Chicano literary and political movements of the 1960s and Õ70s. Moving beyond a simple effort to reinscribe Nuevomexicanos into history, MelŽndez views these newspapers as cultural productions and the work of the editors as an organized movement against cultural erasure amid the massive influx of easterners to the Southwest. Readers will find a wealth of information in this book. But more important, they will come away with the sense that the survival of Nuevomexicanos as a culturally and politically viable group is owed to the labor of this brilliant generation of newspapermen who also were statesmen, scholars, and creative writers.

This study is part of a multiyear effort by the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Justice in Mexico Project at the University of San Diego to analyze the obstacles to and opportunities for improving citizen security in Mexico. Each of the authors featured in this edited volume makes a significant contribution to this endeavor through original research -- including exhaustive data analysis, in-depth qualitative interviews, and direct field observations -- intended to inform policy discussions on how to foster robust civic responses to the problems of crime and violence. This research was developed with an intended audience of policymakers, journalists, leaders of nongovernmental organizations, and other current and future leaders working to address these problems in Mexico. However, there are also important lessons from Mexico's experience that may have resonance in elsewhere in Latin America and other societies grappling with similar challenges.