A prominent Mexican daily newspaper accused a government body of censorship Thursday, adding to the harsh criticism increasingly being heaped against President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration for failing to protect freedom of the press in the wake of a slew of murders of journalists in the country.
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Mexican Journalists Have Had 'Enough' of the Killings and Impunity
La Jornada reported that the Secretariat of National Defense, known by its Spanish acronym Sedena, denied one of their reporters entry to a ceremony kicking off an international meeting on obesity and diabetes in Mexico City Thursday morning.
According to the newspaper, just minutes before La Jornada journalist Jose Arando boarded the press bus transporting reporters to the event, a Sedena official approached him and told him he was not allowed to go on the bus because he “had not been invited.”
La Jornada accused Sedena of “denying this news organization access to the event.”
According to the report, Sedena’s communications department stopped sending press releases and media invitations to La Jornada at the beginning of this year without explanation.
The accusation of government censorship comes just days after a prominent veteran La Jornada reporter covering drug crime in the violence-plagued state of Sinaloa, Javier Valdez, was shot dead in broad daylight in Culiacan. Valdez, founder of the media outlet Riodoce and the author of several books, was the sixth journalist to be killed in Mexico so far this year, in a worsening crisis of violent attacks against press workers. His assassination sparked national and international outcry.
In the wake of the murder and ongoing hostility toward reporters in the country, more than 60 Mexican and international media outlets, including La Jornada, issued a powerful statement Wednesday slamming the soaring levels of violence, and called on the government to do more to protect journalists.
“Today in Mexico, impunity, corruption and, in particular, organized crime, have put at risk a fundamental task for society,” read the collective statement under the banner “Enough.”
“As information professionals, we denounce the murderous offensive that members of our community have suffered in the exercise of their task of investigating and disseminating activities of crime, including narco-crime in Mexico,” the statement continued.
According a special prosecutor’s officer in Mexico overseeing crimes against freedom of expression, more than 100 journalists have been killed in the country since 2000. Few of the cases have been brought to justice as rampant impunity continues to fuel grave abuses.