What do murdered journalists leave behind?

Text Anabel Hernández, journalist

Miguel Angel López Jr. and Regina meet in the courtyard of an old white house in the San Miguel Chapultepec neighborhood of Mexico City at the People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists. They don’t know it, but their fates have followed similar paths for the last eleven years, and on this rainy afternoon, their paths have crossed.

Both are the children of journalists in Mexico, the country that tops the shameful ranking of the most dangerous for journalists, with more than 150 murdered in the last 20 years and another nine disappeared. Eleven journalists have already been murdered this year because the killers and instigators know that a system of corruption guarantees 98 percent impunity for murdering a journalist and 100 percent for a disappearance.

By silencing the free press, criminal or other interest groups decide what gets published in order to control citizens through disinformation in a country where over 60 percent of the population lives in poverty.

Amid all this, hundreds of additional victims have been made invisible, abandoned, and re-victimized by the prevailing criminal system. They are the relatives of the murdered, disappeared, and threatened journalists. They are the thousands of other journalists who see their colleagues dismembered, dumped in garbage bags in the middle of the street or shot at the door or even in their own homes. Those thousands of eyes and ears receiving the message, “You could be next.”

Miguel Angel López Jr. is the son of Miguel Ángel López Velasco, also known as Milo Vela. A legendary journalist from the Mexican state of Veracruz. Once world famous for jarocho songs like La Bamba, it is now known for holding the record for the most murdered journalists in the world: 25 since 2007.

Milo Vela was a crime reporter and worked for Notiver, the largest newspaper in Veracruz. He worked in the police news department and wrote an opinion column, “Va de nuez.” He had more than 30 years’ experience in journalism. “We are like the mailman, we deliver good and bad information, but we don’t create it,” he used to say.

In 2006, brutal violence erupted in Veracruz, as it did in the rest of the country. President Felipe Calderón supposedly declared war on drug trafficking, although it later turned out that this was a farce. His government, as well as other state and local governments, were involved in the criminal organizations they were supposedly fighting.

Milo reported on kidnappings, extortion, executions, oil theft and human trafficking.

On Sunday, June 19, 2011, Father’s Day, the journalist and his three children and wife were celebrating at their home. The next morning, an aunt called Jazmín to tell her that there had been a break-in at her parents’ house. She wanted to know what had happened and called home, but no one answered.

Miguel arrived at the scene as the police were inspecting the house. On the second floor, he saw his mother’s dead body, executed with a mercy bullet, his father’s face disfigured by bullets, and his brother face down with his skull also smashed to pieces by bullets.

Jazmín tells how many people attended first night of the funeral, but the next day they were all alone: No one from the authorities, no legal advice, no psychological support. They were alone.

“We were like human garbage; like they would be killed, too if they got too close,” she recalls.

Afraid of becoming the next victim, Miguel AngelJr. had to leave Veracruz the day after the funeral and flee to Mexico City. Balbina Flores, head of Reporters Without Borders (ROG) in Mexico and very active in protecting journalists and seeking justice, was the only person who showed compassion and brought Jazmín to see her brother.

However, the distance between Veracruz and the capital was not enough to ensure his safety. Miguel AngelJr. had to seek refuge in another country, where he applied for political asylum. This meant that he could not return home or see his family again for 10 long years. He can now return, at least for visits, but the massacre of his family remains unpunished.

Lucía Lagunes is a journalist and a member of the Council of the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists of the Mexican Ministry of the Interior, created in 2013 to prevent further killings. She knows firsthand why, although the government has instruments to protect journalists, they are not effective.

Currently, 545 people are protected by the program in Mexico, forty percent of whom are journalists, and thirty percent of whom are female journalists. Protection measures range from escorts, bulletproof vests, shelters, and food to a panic button that can locate the person in real time.

To address the inefficiencies of the protection program, care units were created in 2017 to coordinate protection efforts between the governments of the 32 states and the federal government. “What are these units? It can be a single person with authority to carry out a request of the protection program,” says Lucía Lagunes. (Testimony of Lucía Lagunes at the hearing before the People’s Tribunal in Mexico City on April 26, 2022).

Men pass away, but their ideas remain.

As if being threatened for their journalistic work were not bad enough, endangered women journalists also experience sexual harassment by their own bodyguards. Until now, the protection program has ignored such complaints. “They don’t understand what it means for a female journalist … to have to watch out for those who are supposed to be watching out for her,” Lagunes recounts.

Giovanni Falcone

“Until four years ago, we could say that the protection mechanism saved journalists, but today we can no longer say that,” Lucía Lagunes adds emphatically.

Regina knows the pain of surviving. She was barely 15 and her brother one year old when their lives changed radically. A group of powerful and corrupt police officers had plotted to murder her mother, a journalist.

Since December 2010, Regina had to live with bodyguards. Although she only had to cross one street on her way to school, she had armed escorts. It wasn’t until January 2011, after an attack on her grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins in a cafeteria, that she understood the danger her entire world was in. Her mother was all she had, but she inexplicably grew increasingly distant. While she had been immersed in her research on drug trafficking for years, in the end she was always there. But now, instead of a mother, there was only a ghost at home.

No one could explain to her what had happened. She only had a notion. She listened to some interviews her mother gave to the media to find out what was happening to her, but she was only 15 and could not understand the scope. She began to isolate herself to protect her mother. She didn’t go to parties, and then she wasn’t even invited because, like Jazmin, she was considered a risk. Her home became a prison.

Journalists from the Mexican state of Michoacan protest holding banners against the murdering of one more of their collegues in the region,Morelia, Mexico, July 8, 2010.

One day in December 2013, when she was on a family trip with her little brother and mother, her mother received a phone call. From the look on her face, it appeared to be an emergency, bad news. That same night, she exchanged plane tickets, and they arrived home the next day.

Although her mother was in the government protection program, that did not stop a group of eleven armed men from surrounding and entering her home, thinking they were there. Regina had not known, until reading an article about her mother, that months earlier decapitated animals had been dumped in front of her house and an informant of her mother’s had been killed in broad daylight. The arrival of these men was more than a final warning.

A few months later, she, her brother and her mother had to leave Mexico to survive, like so many other journalists and their families. She left her friends, her school, and her family. She was so used to hell and confinement that it felt like a miracle when, for the first time in four years, she was able to move without an armed escort.

They are not dead, they must live on in the collective memory as symbols of resistance.

None of the people who attacked and intimidated her family are in custody. She knows that she can only return to her country if there is justice. Miguel AngelJr. also knows this. Perhaps hope brought them together and led them to sit and speak with other relatives of murdered or threatened journalists at the People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists. With the support of ROG, Free Press Unlimited and the Committee to Protect Journalists, the People’s Tribunal is seeking justice.

The older, more experienced Miguel told Regina that it was fate that they had met. They talked about how similar their lives were, how they had suffered very similar things as children of journalists and concluded that their paths had crossed so they can know they are not alone.

Journalists take part in a protest to mark one month since the murder of their colleague Javier Valdez, a noted expert on the country’s drugcartels and AFP contributor whose death appears far from being broughtto justice in downtown Mexico City on June 15, 2017.

He asked Regina to understand her mother. “Certainly, your mother made many sacrifices, and she didn’t always show it to you, but she was probably more afraid than you were. Maybe you didn’t understand it then, but now that you have a chance to build a life for yourself, you know she was right. She was fighting for something bigger, which is the truth.” These words were not only for Regina, but for himself as well. He understood the reason for his father’s death and that the ideal he believed in lived on.

What did the murdered journalists leave behind? Their sons, daughters, husbands, wives, siblings and the legacy of their work remain. If their families are helped to recover and live on, they will be an indelible symbol of their victory.

They are not dead, they must live on in the collective memory as symbols of resistance, in times when crime and political and economic powers seek to dominate a nation by silencing the truth.

Anabel Hernández

is Mexican investigative journalist who received the DW Freedom of Speech Award in 2019 for her reporting on corruption and the collusion between government officials and drug cartels in her home country. Her book “Los Señores del Narco” (Narcoland), published in 2010, documented these illegal relations and gained Hernández international recognition. Forced to leave her home country following severe harassment and death threats, Hernández now lives in Europe and is a regular contributor to DW.