SAN DIEGO — Even as journalists in dozens of cities across Mexico held vigils and demonstrations in recent weeks to protest vicious killings of two of their colleagues, the threats against local Tijuana reporters continued to pour in on social media and in person.
“I know where this reporter lives. I know where his whole family lives,” posted one Facebook commenter on a screengrab from a video from the scene of photojournalist Margarito Martínez Esquivel’s Jan. 17 murder. The comment was about one of the reporters who had rushed to cover the fatal shooting of his colleague.
The siege of violence against local journalists — two of whom were fatally shot in front of their homes just days apart in Tijuana — has underscored the fragility of Mexico’s democracy. It has also prompted widespread outrage and journalist-led protests against the impotency of the country’s justice system and its long-standing cycle of brutality and impunity.
“The level of involvement by journalists all across the country this week is really something that I haven’t seen before,” Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ representative in Mexico, told the Fronteras desk on Jan. 27. “And I think it’s a testament to the will of journalists to no longer accept what’s happening.”
Shootings, stabbings and a gunfight
Last month, in addition to the two reporters gunned down and killed in Baja California — Martínez and Lourdes Maldonado López, who was shot and killed in Tijuana on Jan 23 — a reporter was fatally stabbed in Veracruz. There also was an attempted killing of a reporter in Oaxaca; a local reporter was badly injured in a stabbing in Yucatán; and another journalist was trapped with his family in the middle of a fierce gun battle in Guerrero.
Mexico has long been considered the most dangerous country in the world for journalists outside active war zones. There have been 148 reporters killed since 2000, according to human rights group Article 19.
In Tijuana, a city that routinely registers nearly 2,000 murders a year, sometimes even slight encounters with a stranger could put someone at risk. Journalists, by the nature of their job, get closer to potentially dangerous situations more often than the average citizen.
The Mexican government has vowed that, this time, it will get answers — a promise that rings empty in a country without answers.
Mexico’s Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas said in December that more than 90% of murders of journalists and human rights defenders remain unresolved, despite a government system meant to protect them. He added that when the culprits have been identified, almost half are local officials.
A federal delegate to Baja California on Jan. 26 promised a thorough investigation into the killing of Maldonado.
“The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is determined to put a stop and set an example in Baja California on the issue of the assassination of the journalist ... absolutely all the people with whom she had a neighborhood conflict, a personal conflict, a labor conflict, an emotional conflict, all will have to enter into the investigation,” said Jesús Alejandro Ruiz Uribe, the federal delegate.
The same day, Baja California Gov. Marina del Pilar Ávila named a special prosecutor to investigate the journalist murders — Atalo Machado Yepez, who previously worked as a public prosecutor in Mexicali.
Facebook or journalism?
In Baja, a proliferation of Facebook pages aimed at capturing public safety incidents specific to certain neighborhoods has created confusion among the public — about which content is the product of journalistic work, as opposed to content aimed at helping criminal organizations seek revenge or protect their territory.
Often, Facebook is where threats first surface.
In December, veteran journalist Martínez went to cover the scene of a house fire in the Cuauhtémoc neighborhood of the Sánchez Taboada area. It was the second time in three months the home had been consumed by flames, according to La Jornada de Baja California. The causes of the fires were unknown.
Facebook video shows that Martínez got into a verbal altercation with a man who was also streaming live video from the scene of the fire. (That man was later identified as Angel Peña. After Martínez’s murder, Peña was identified by the local press as a former Tijuana police officer.)
“Don’t focus on my car!” Peña yelled in the video. “Don’t focus on my face.”
“Because of his (Martínez’s) photos, I had a problem trying to cross (the border) into San Ysidro because they sent me to secondary inspection and searched my vehicle, ” Peña explained to his audience. He repeatedly described himself as a “communicator” during the nine-minute confrontation.
“I don’t care about your 20 years of being a reporter. I’m a communicator ... I tell the truth and I don’t care whether you administer Tijuana en Guerra,” he said, referring to another non-journalistic Facebook page that Martínez did not operate. Peña was detained on Jan. 19 in connection with Martínez’s homicide, but then he was later released.
Martínez sent photos and details about the encounter to a WhatsApp group formed to help Baja journalists report safety concerns.
Ricardo Iván Carpio, the Attorney General of Baja, confirmed on Jan. 26 that investigators had ruled out the line of investigation that Martínez’s killing was prompted by a personal dispute he had with a neighbor — an idea floated by Tijuana police immediately after Martínez’s death. Investigators are now focusing in on a possible tie to organized crime, Carpio confirmed.
Gabriela Martínez, a local Tijuana journalist, explained on the Jan. 27 morning’s edition of the news program "Esquina 32" the difference between what Margarito Martínez and other crime reporters do versus the “communicators” or social media bloggers, who run the often anonymous and non-journalistic Facebook pages.
She said the key contrast is that journalists put their true name and their identity on their work, often risking their own safety and that of their families to get the information into the hands of the public.
“They go at night when we are asleep to get the information. Then, you guys, can watch in the comfort of your home,” said Martínez. (She is not related to Margarito Martínez.)
She added journalistic work is held to ethical standards and the professional standards of the news organizations where they work, such as confirming facts before they’re reported and not putting sources in danger.
Routine threats, low pay
Martínez’s work put him in close proximity to a dark underworld. In 2017, he was featured in a Los Angeles Times report about the dangers Mexican journalists face.
Besides the routine threats, most reporters in Mexico earn less than $2,000 a month, sometimes causing them to have to work at a hurried pace for several outlets at once. And unless they work multiple jobs, reporters in Tijuana are more likely to live in more dangerous and more affordable areas in the city.
Over the last three decades, as the Tijuana weekly magazine Zeta documented government corruption and Mexico’s exploding drug war, two of its editors were killed and a third gravely wounded. After each death and shooting, the tight-knit staff had to put their feelings aside to put out the next edition of the paper.
“After publishing a story about military involvement in murder, a military commander told me that I could disappear and no one would notice. He said it as a joke, but it scared me,” recounted one local Tijuana journalist, who asked not to be named because of the seriousness of the threat.
Another reporter talked about being chased from the scene of a crime by a car.
“I’ve been threatened many times over the years,” he said.
Besides threats, reporters also routinely have to fight for labor rights and better working conditions.
Maldonado had been locked for years in a labor lawsuit she pursued against Baja California’s former governor Jaime Bonilla, who is the owner of a media company.
She alleged she had been wrongly fired by Bonilla’s company and sued it for back wages. Days before her death, she received the judge’s order in her favor. So far, there have been no arrests in connection with her murder.
If history is any indicator, it’s unlikely the public will ever get answers about why Maldonado was killed.
Elusive justice
“I know they’re going to kill me,” Regina Martínez told a friend in 2012. (She also is unrelated to Margarito Martínez.)
Family and friends urged the Veracruz-based national correspondent for Proceso to quit and move away. But she went right on digging into drug gangs and political corruption until the day that same year she was beaten and strangled to death in her bathroom — a murder just as horrific as the crimes she often reported on.
Veracruz investigators immediately insisted her death had nothing to do with her profession as a journalist, that she was murdered by a drug-addicted male prostitute they claimed was her lover.
That version might have stood. But in 2020, in an unprecedented collaboration, an international network of investigative journalists — some 60 journalists from 25 international outlets — set out to get answers about her killing and finish Martínez’s last story. That story she never got a chance to tell — and that the Mexican federal government likely had wanted to leave buried — said that thousands of Mexican citizens were mysteriously disappearing, possibly at the hands of U.S.-trained government forces.
In 2020, after the international work was made public, President López Obrador conceded that the investigation into Martinez murder should be reopened.
Her family maintains her killer has never been brought to justice.
At Maldonado's funeral on Jan. 27, a family member didn’t seem optimistic about receiving justice in this lifetime for the more recent local crimes. But she did hope the journalist’s colleagues continued in their work.
“Keep up the fight, we must fight for the right to express ourselves. And do not be afraid ... There will always be justice, divine justice is the most beautiful one,” said Maldonado’s niece, Renee.
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