2022 is deadliest year on record for Mexican journalists
MEXICO CITY — The deadliest year in at least three decades for Mexican journalists and media workers is nearing a close, with 15 slayings — a perilous situation underlined by a brazen near-miss attack this week on one of the country’s most prominent journalists.
Two gunmen astride a motorcycle shot up radio and television journalist Ciro Gómez Leyva’s armored vehicle 200 yards from his home Thursday night. The journalist described the attack and posted photos of his vehicle to social media.
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Solidarity has grown among Mexico’s press corps amid the carnage, and its members are making increasing noise after each killing.
They also have pushed back against a longtime government narrative that the victims weren’t real journalists or were corrupt.
Still, the killings — 15 counted by The Associated Press — have continued to rise.
This year, many of the dead were small town reporters running their own outlets on a shoestring.
Others were freelancers, including for national publications, in big cities like Tijuana.
Also on Thursday, assailants took aim at journalist Flavio Reyes de Dios, director of an online news site in Palenque, a town in the southern state of Chiapas.
A vehicle without license plates followed him and then ran his motorcycle off the road, injuring the journalist, the press advocacy group Article 19 said.
That incident drew little notice. But it was national news that shots were fired at Gómez Leyva, who is one of Mexico’s best known journalists.
He is a regular critic of the government and a frequent target of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s tirades against press criticism.
Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, said that this year the only nation to see more journalists killed is Ukraine.
“We started gathering data on homicides of journalists in 1992, and it’s been both the highest number of journalist killings in a single year, and we can also say that so far it looks to be the deadliest ‘sexenio’ (Mexico’s six-year presidential term), which means the deadliest period of a single Mexican president if the trend as things stand right now continues,” Hootsen said.
