Teresa Alcocer Carmona read the fate of her listeners at a radio station in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, in northern Mexico. On Tuesday at the end of the afternoon, the announcer, who called herself on the air Barbara Greco, got out of a vehicle in front of her house when she was killed with two shots. It happened in the El Barreal neighborhood, just south of the center of the border city with the United States. Alcocer Carmona was 37 years old.
On Wednesday night and hundreds of kilometers south of Chihuahua, Adrián Fernández Guerra celebrated his 59th birthday at a bar in the capital of Morelos, Cuernavaca, when a shooting began. It was 20:30 on Wednesday when a group of armed men entered the scene, murdered an employee and kidnapped Fernández Guerra, director of the magazine profile, dedicated to preparing reports on businessmen and politicians of the State.
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Fernández Guerra was released Thursday afternoon after an operation carried out by the Morelos anti-kidnap prosecutor's office. The operation involved military and police, who managed to locate the journalist and businessman in a safe house on the outskirts of Cuernavaca. Eight people were arrested by the authorities. The release has become good news among the rosary of misfortunes that usually accompanies the information of local journalists.
Both cases reflect the hostility faced by journalists in Mexico amid a wave of violence that hits several areas of the country. The murder of Alcocer Carmona is the second reported in 2020 after the death of Fidel Ávila Gómez, also a radio host, whose body was found on January 9 in Michoacán, west of the country. The National Human Rights Commission states that 155 communicators have been murdered in Mexico since 2000.
In both cases, official information was scarce. Local prosecutors merely reported that investigations would be expanded. Neither of the two journalists had been threatened before. The desolation in the face of this violence has been very well reflected in the voice of Yessenia Balvas Fajardo, wife of Fernández Guerra, who on Thursday morning told the media, after filing her complaint with the local Prosecutor's Office: “We have been here all our lives, Everyone knows him. He was always willing to help and was never threatened. Please return it to me. ”
Journalists from Morelos met Thursday at the Zócalo de Cuernavaca to pressure the authorities for the search and live appearance of Fernández Guerra. The protesters appealed directly to the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, so that the protection mechanism for activists and communicators works effectively in coordination with local governments. Since its creation, in 2012, 292 journalists threatened with death seek government protection through this system, of which the authorities recognize technological and logistics failures. The requests of the Morelenses communicators were heard and the country has found an unexpected end to this story. A happy ending. Not so in the case of Barbara Greco, whose homicide swells a black list.
