by Cordelia Rizzo
It has become very difficult to articulate what is going on in the crime-laden cities of Mexico. President Felipe Calderon makes sure we are constantly aware of the efforts to prevail in the quintessentially unwinnable “war on drugs.” In the meantime, cities have become ghost towns, and society has gone from indignation to generalized hysteria-prone impotence.
In such an environment, being a journalist is a dangerous and difficult profession. Unfortunately, Mexico’s media has done little to explain the complexity of the current situation. Light editorialists, more numerous than real reporters, reassure familiar assumptions of their audience: Politicians and police are corrupt, government institutions are worthless, drug lords are ruthless, and the media is just doing its job. These journalists are often reactionaries disguised as liberal thinkers. They presume to be unaffected by bad morals and seem allergic to perspectives that oppose their own. Their stands on crucial issues remain innocuous as well as uninformed. Their employers are squarely mainstream and indistinctively independent media outlets that benefit greatly from appearing to provide the readers with the truth while, in reality, maintaining poignant critiques at bay.
Many Mexican cities are currently filled with Federal Police officers and soldiers who frequently produce more violence than crime relief. It is strange why, for example, the people in Monterrey are blindly optimistic about the army patrolling the streets given that the vastly publicized killing of the two students from the Monterrey Tech (ITESM) last March clearly reflected the army’s lack of criterion for firing weapons and incompetence in handling a crime scene. This October, on the porch of an Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez building, where a conference on alternatives to militarization was about to begin, a student was shot by the Federal Police and left in a critical condition. There was little reporting on how the federal troops terrorized the crowd that day and the following ones.
If the media is there to voice societal concerns, where are the stories that chronicle the way in which the state instills terror in the already weary population? Why is no one reporting on the weekly protest Kaminata Contra la Muerte at Ciudad Juárez and other initiatives that try to rectify the situation? It is no wonder that many civil rights activists and sensible citizens in Mexico prefer to get their news elsewhere rather than listen to ridiculously well-paid but biased and uninformed journalists preach good morals.
Cordelia Rizzo holds a master’s in philosophy from the University of Leuven and works on promoting minority rights at Nuevo León’s Human Rights State Commission.
