MEXICO.- Gildo Garza fled from Tamaulipas to avoid his death. It was in 2017, after a kidnapping, torture sessions, smear campaigns and attacks on the newspaper Cambio, the media outlet he bet 03 years of his life as a director.
Five years later, now a lawyer and activist, he concludes: “The Journalist Protection Mechanism must disappear”.
His statements are as forceful as they are controversial, he acknowledges. Because it was this system of the Mexican State, dependent on the Ministry of the Interior, that helped him survive, but also in which he has seen more money leak than protection for threatened journalists.
On the one hand, he details in an interview with this newspaper, “they inflate the prices of the services they give us”. For example, they say that the telephone, electricity, rent, have a cost that if paid by a normal person would be half; on the other hand, when the mechanism notifies the state governments, it revictimizes them because in most cases the authorities are the enemies of the communicators.
Gildo Garza’s arguments about the deficiencies of the Mexican State to guarantee the lives of communicators coincide with the report published in recent days with the title Low Risk, a study by the international organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) with the support of the UN.
Low risk locates program failures officers on his duty to shelter journalists who are at risk in Latin America; Mexico in the first place.
Since 2019, this country is the nation where the most communicators have been murdered year. Only in 2021, there were seven. In January and February of 2022, another five fell; among them Lourdes Maldonado , who recounted her fears at a press conference by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and who was under the protection of the government of the state of Baja California.
Along with Maldonado, there were nine journalists who, despite being protected by the state, fell into the hands of murderers.
The Law for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists was approved in 2012. From it, a mechanism directed towards these two profiles was created. Its objective is to establish cooperation between the federal government and the states to implement preventive and protective measures in case of risk.
Among the urgent actions are the removal of the victim from the place where she is in danger, her temporary relocation and the assignment of escorts to protect the property where the beneficiary is, in addition to other necessary to safeguard the life and integrity of defenders.
In principle, the transfer of victims to another safer city is usually the most effective; the problem is how they survive afterwards, explains Gildo Garza.
“They gave me shelter in another place where I had to start from scratch, with my whole family with nothing but 70 daily pesos (around $3 USD) for food”, he warned.
The Tamaulipas journalist had to reinvent himself. Leave behind the investigations into organized crime, cartels, corrupt officials and reduce the Exchange paper to only digital. He founded a civil institution for displaced journalists and began to study law to learn the ins and outs of the law while one of his daughters woke up disturbed at night.
The whole family was distraught. He did not receive psychological or medical attention and, except for the payment of rent, he had to scratch himself with his own fingernails to survive. Gildo did graphic design, marketing, food to sell…
He still doesn’t feel fully reinserted.
“The government would have to get to work in a comprehensive manner: activate the Ministry of Economy to facilitate business credits for affected journalists; credits for housing, an executive commission to care for victims until the crime is repaired and, if the threats continue, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to get them out of the country”, he warns.
But there is nothing like that. “Much less in research,” he specifies. “The Attorney General’s Office has opened seven files on my case, but it remains unpunished.”
The Low Risk report indicates that despite that the Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Committed against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) operates from 2010, the results are minimal and with alarming conclusions.
Of the 1,100 investigations initiated by the institution between 2010 and 2018, only the 16.3% ended in processes or trials and of the ten sentences obtained based on the investigations, six had at least one public servant involved.
“Imagine, many journalists have been told that they are no longer in danger and they are pushed to return to their states, to the slaughterhouse”, he details. Gildo, who is currently in a legal battle not to have his shelter taken away.
He never had escorts and a while ago they removed the panic alert button.
The official version, through Enrique Irazoque Palazuelos, national executive coordinator of the mechanism, from the Ministry of the Interior, acknowledged that there is “a human rights crisis, in which the Mexican government is considered responsible for the death of journalists and defenders”.
He explained that in order to be clear about the structural factors that put journalists in the crosshairs of assassins, next April the government will hold seven regional meetings to discuss with society as a whole proposals for the new law and for the elaboration of the National System.
The RSF report advances that it is about institutional shortcomings that lead to impunity: lack of coordination between police or lack of money for them to investigate; inexperience and lack of empathy on the part of the officials in charge of the mechanism, bureaucracy…
The law establishes a deadline of up to 10 days to carry out the risk analysis and others 30 days to implement the protection plan!
“The reality is that it cannot be the obligation of a single institution to solve a historical and structural problem of Mexican society, which is manifested in the growing number of attacks and murders of journalists and human rights defenders. of human rights”, concludes RSF. “The state apparatus would need to face this challenge as a whole.”
You may be interested in: – Journalists from Baja California demand justice from AMLO for the murder of communicators
– Journalists had already expressed that they feared for their lives
– Narco threatens reporters, announces cleanup of journalists in Guerrero