“Mexico demands justice”. Credit: Rubén Espinosa. All rights reserved.On 31 July 2015 the photojournalist Rubén Espinosa was tortured and murdered
in a house in Mexico City. His four female companions, including an activist
from Veracruz, were raped, tortured, and also killed. While Veracruz, the city in
which Espinosa worked, is known to be a hostile environment for journalists and
activists, this is the first time that a journalist from Veracruz has had his
safety compromised in the capital. The slaughter of Espinosa demonstrates not
only how dire the situation for journalists in Mexico has become, but is
exemplary of the way in which formally democratic countries like Mexico deal
with political challengers.
According to Article 19, the international organization that
promotes press freedom, Espinosa is the twelfth journalist from Veracruz
to be killed since 2010. In light of that number, Veracruz can call itself the
most dangerous state for journalists in Mexico, and, according to Reporters Without Borders, even one of the most dangerous places in the world.
While clientelism, corruption, and a climate of fear have already
resulted in the fact that only a limited amount of journalists still write
critically about the state government, most people that do engage in critical
journalism await the same fate: masked men knock on the door, often followed by
torture, rape, and murder, and finally a statement from the federal chief
prosecutor in which he emphasizes that the murder is not necessarily
politically driven. In other words, the victim was in the wrong place at the
wrong time.
Recently, a team of investigative journalists discovered that the
Veracruz state police had kept a secret
file on 20 activists regarded as “security risks”. It’s a list of names
that shares an important similarity with the string of victims in Veracruz:
people who have openly criticized the state government, and have published
about corruption and repression by that government. It is clear that the recent
killings, and those before Espinosa, are politically driven. Human Rights
organizations such as Amnesty
International and Civil Rights organizations such as Article 19 recognize
this. But policy-makers and commentators around the world continue to
misunderstand the nature of this repression.
A mural in Veracruz, painted by a collective of journalists and artists. Some rights reserved.Take the minister of foreign affairs of the Netherlands, Bert
Koenders, for example, who praised the Mexican government for its international
promotion of human rights after his latest diplomatic visit. In a press
release, he noted that the Netherlands and Mexico are becoming more alike
in their political ambitions. Koenders emphasized that Mexico wants to take
more responsibility for promoting peace and safety in the world – by supporting
UN peacekeeping missions. He described the efforts of the Mexican government to
curb international drug problems as “admirable.” This while numerous
journalists who have investigated the links between politicians and drug
cartels have been brutally killed. Koenders’ statement is characteristic of the
way in which policy-makers only address the official position of a country when
it comes to human rights, and leave out the empirical position.
Human rights and civil rights organizations are less positive about
the Mexican government, and such organizations have repeatedly tried to put
pressure on the government to end the extra-judicial killings of journalists
and activists. This is made difficult given that the state repression of
dissidents in Mexico is exercised in a decentralized fashion. But some of the
blame over the misinterpretation of repression must also be directed at
non-governmental organizations themselves. One of the most
influential democracy watchdogs, Freedom House, evaluates Mexico
as an average performer when it comes to the state of civil rights and
political freedom. This is in contrast to countries like China which does
badly on such ratings. The reason why Freedom House is relatively generous to
Mexico is the same reason why the Dutch minister of foreign affairs is so
positive about the political ambitions of the Mexican government: both are
essentially saying something about official government policies, not real
practice.
The kind of reporting used by Freedom House mainly targets the legal
freedoms people enjoy in a country, such as the right to participate freely in
elections or the right to conduct journalism unhindered. In Mexico, these
freedoms are indeed reasonably well protected by the law in comparison to
China. But these measurements do not say much about how countries live up to
those legal standards. The consequence of this is that countries like China,
where political opponents are prosecuted via national law, have worse ratings
than countries where political opponents are tortured and murdered in their own
homes.
In countries where politicians do not have the formal means to
repress political opponents, another toolbox of repression is often opened –
the execution of repression in collaboration with organized criminality, while federal
politicians turn a blind eye. Any solution must separate political repression
in its most essential form from the manifestations of repression, define
repression as a fundamental intolerance to political opposition, and be open to
the ways in which this intolerance can be manifested. If we use these new
lenses, we might be able to better understand new and more nebulous forms of
repression.
