Four journalists murdered around the world in the last ten days, two of them in Mexico

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Ten days before she was assassinated outside a Mexican convenience store, Yesenia Mollinedo noticed two mysterious stalkers following her on a motorbike.

“We know where you live, bitch,” one of them warned the journalist, the director of an online news outlet called El Veraz (The Truthful One) whose motto is “Journalism with Humanity”.

For more than a year, Mollinedo, 45, had been trying to shrug off what she hoped were empty threats designed to silence the stories she published about crime in the coastal town of Cosoleacaque. She repeatedly changed her phone number in an attempt to escape the intimidation. “I don’t think anything will happen to me,” Mollinedo insisted when relatives asked about her safety.

But at about 1.15 pm last Monday it did. As the journalist stepped out of the shop with a rookie colleague, the assassins pounced, firing 16 shots that would end the lives of both women.

“Yesenia didn’t owe anything to anyone,” her brother, a fellow journalist called Ramiro Mollinedo, said this week as overwhelmed family members laid her to rest and fretted over their own safety now his sister was gone. “We don’t know who we are up against,” he admitted.

Mollinedo and Sheila Johana García were the first of four female journalists to lose their lives in the line of duty last week, a spasm of butchery that shocked the world.

Two days later, the Al Jazeera correspondent Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was shot in the face while covering an anticipated Israeli military raid in the occupied West Bank.

The next day, a 29-year-old Chilean journalist, Francisca Sandoval, died after being shot in the head while covering May Day protests at the start of the month.

“Francisca was the most wonderful mother and daughter,” remembered Gabriel Cardozo, a photographer at Señal 3 de La Victoria, the channel where Sandoval had worked.

“She was one of those people who would always be looking out for you … How can you express your pain at losing someone with whom you’ve been through so much?”

The deaths of so many journalists in such a short space of time have sparked an international outcry and soul-searching in newsrooms from Mexico City to Doha.

“All we wanted to do was our job,” said Shatha Hanayshe, a Palestinian journalist who was standing next to the respected Al Jazeera reporter when she was gunned down trying to document the Israeli operation in Jenin.

“This will stay with me for the rest of my life,” added the 26-year-old journalist who appears frozen to the spot next to her colleague’s corpse in chilling footage showing the aftermath of that shooting. “There is no need to target us.”

Robert Mahoney, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said each of the shootings was particular and had taken place in different circumstances: “But there is a common thread here, which is that in 2022 we have seen a real upsurge in the numbers of journalists being killed.

“It is very difficult to draw a direct connection between any of these killings except to say that it has become – and is becoming, I believe – more dangerous to do independent journalism,” Mahoney added.

Yesenia Mollinedo Falconi.
Yesenia Mollinedo Falconi. Photograph: Facebook Yesenia Mollinedo Falconi/Reuters

Part of the increase in bloodshed is the result of the outbreak of war in Ukraine, where at least seven journalists have died since Vladimir Putin’s invasion on 24 February. Thousands of civilians are also thought to have lost their lives.

The stunning surge in killings in Mexico, where local campaigners say 11 journalists have been assassinated since January compared with seven last year, had also contributed to the global rise. “It’s censorship through the gun,” Mahoney said of the wave of organized crime-related killings in the Latin American country whose media-bashing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been accused of encouraging the violence with his populist rhetoric.

“[It’s] killing people in order to send a message … [and] bring about that real cancer on journalism which is self-censorship: when journalists just stop or comply because it is just too dangerous to do otherwise.”

Yet campaigners say the killings are only the most dramatic expression of an increasingly gloomy outlook for media freedom in an ever-more authoritarian world.

The Chinese city of Hong Kong – home until recently to a feisty independent journalism scene – has been transformed in just a few years since Beijing’s imposition of draconian national security law. “There is a now a palpable sense that the fight for democracy and media freedom has entered its endgame,” the International Federation for Journalists warned of China’s crackdown earlier this year, describing how many media workers had been jailed or fled the former colony in recent months.

Sources: The Guardian, El Veraz, Al Jazeera

Mexico Daily Post