The assassination attempt against the journalist Ciro Gómez Leyva has once again put the focus on the dangers of practicing the profession in Mexico.
The Latin American country is the deadliest place in the world for journalists.
So far in 2022, 17 professionals have lost their lives, 12 of them directly due to their work, according to the Article 19 association. There has not been a more lethal year since records were kept.
While this is happening, union organizations denounce the extremely high impunity around the crimes and a deterioration of the climate for press freedom in the face of continuous attacks by the authorities.
The start of 2022 was fateful.
In January and in less than a week, the photographer Margarito Martínez and the reporter Lourdes Maldonado, who was part of a local protection mechanism for journalists, were shot to death in Tijuana.
Since then, the blood trail has only gotten longer.
Most of the victims are local reporters writing about corruption or drug violence far from Mexico City.
The last to lose his life was Pedro Pablo Kumul, a Veracruz announcer who worked for the digital portal AX Noticias.
At the end of November, he was shot several times while driving a taxi, work that he combined with journalism.
Until now, the deadliest year had been 2017, with 12 deaths.
Mexico registers more murdered reporters than countries at war such as Ukraine, where Reporters Without Borders recorded eight deaths, or Syria, with three.
According to the balance of this organization, the Latin American country concentrates so far this year 20% of the violent deaths of journalists worldwide and its lethality is well above that of other neighboring nations, such as Brazil or Colombia. .
In a report on the first half of this year, the NGO defending press freedom Article 19 estimates that acts of intimidation and harassment against reporters have increased by 52% compared to the same period in 2016 and points out to the Mexican authorities at all levels as the main aggressors.
During the first six months, 39% of the attacks, 128 in total, were perpetrated by officials.
Organized crime, for its part, was responsible for 30 attacks.
Mexico City, with 49, was the place where the press was attacked the most, followed by Yucatán and Michoacán, with 30 each state.
Faced with attacks, the Mexican authorities tend to rule out that the attacks are due to journalistic work and, very rarely, are the culprits prosecuted.
After the deaths of Martínez and Maldonado in Tijuana, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador added a section to his morning conference called “Zero Impunity” to follow up on the investigations.
Instead of clarifying the facts, Article 19 considers that the space "has re-victimized the victims and they have even published conflicting information with the local authorities and prosecutors."
On the other hand, the president has continued to insult the critical press day in and day out.
Despite the fact that the president expressed his solidarity with Gómez Leyva on Friday for the assassination attempt, just two days before he had said that listening to his program was "harmful to health."
The next day, López Obrador called Article 19 “reactionary.” The NGO recently denounced that it had suffered at least 18 attacks this year, from judicial harassment proceedings and smear campaigns to death threats.
"The stigmatizing discourse from power (...) creates conditions that perpetuate violence," he said in a statement.
subscribe here
to the EL PAÍS México
newsletter
and receive all the key information on current affairs in this country