Humberto Padgett was reporting on the consequences of drought in Cuitzeo, a rural space of central Mexico, when his automobile was intercepted by armed males on September 13 2024. They threatened him and stole the automobile, his id papers and work gear, together with two bullet-proof jackets.
Padgett, a Mexican investigative journalist and creator, was reporting on Mexico’s rising environmental worries for nationwide discuss radio station Radio Fórmula. It proved to be his final task for the station. Two days later, he tweeted:
At this time I’m leaving journalism indefinitely. The losses I’ve suffered, the harassment and threats my household and I’ve endured, and the neglect I’ve confronted have pressured me to surrender after 26 years of labor. Thanks and good luck.
Padgett made this determination regardless of the very fact he, like many different journalists in Mexico, has been enrolled in a authorities safety scheme for years – the Safety Mechanism for Journalists and Human Rights Defenders, arrange in 2012. A number of different Latin American international locations have related safety programmes, together with Honduras since 2015.
These programmes provide journalists measures resembling panic buttons and emergency telephone alerts, police or personal safety patrols, and safety cameras and alarm methods for his or her properties and places of work. Some are supplied with bodyguards – at occasions, Padgett has obtained 24-hour safety.
But even as soon as journalists are enrolled in these authorities safety schemes, the assaults and threats proceed. Shockingly, many come from state staff who, in each Mexico and Honduras, are regarded as answerable for nearly half of all assaults on journalists. However the prospect of punishment is distant: at the very least 90% of assaults on journalists go unprosecuted and unpunished, that means there may be little deterrent for committing these crimes.
Each Mexico and Honduras at present have leftwing governments which have promised to guard journalists, following a protracted historical past of crimes towards media professionals in each international locations. But the danger to journalists posed by the state has worsened lately amid rising use of spyware and adware, on-line smear campaigns, and rising ranges of anti-media rhetoric.
A mourner holds a photograph of murdered journalist Fredid Roman throughout his funeral within the Mexican state of Guerrero, August 2022.
David Guzman Gonzalez/EPA-EFE
Many journalists there have developed methods for self-protection, together with establishing NGOs that assist colleagues in danger. However whereas they’re doing journalism in ways in which make reporting safer, their work has been additional threatened by the abrupt suspension of USAID and different US grants, which is heightening the risks confronted by journalists in Latin America and all over the world.
Threats from the state
Once I inform individuals about my analysis into how journalists in Latin America cope with the relentless violence and impunity, their first query is often: “Oh, you mean drug cartels?” And certainly, each Padgett and Funes have obtained loss of life threats for his or her investigations into cartels and different organised crime teams.
Padgett was as soon as despatched an unsolicited picture of a dismembered physique in a morgue. He was overwhelmed and kicked within the head by armed males who threatened to kill him and his household whereas he was reporting on drug dealing on a college campus in Mexico Metropolis in 2017. He wears a bullet-proof jacket – or did till it was stolen – and retains his house tackle a intently guarded secret.
However cartels and gangs are solely a part of the story on the subject of anti-press violence and impunity in these international locations. In some ways, the larger story is the risk from the state. This has been a continuing regardless of adjustments in authorities, whether or not proper or left wing.
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My analysis undertaking and ensuing e book had been impressed by my work offering advocacy, sensible and ethical assist for journalists in danger in Latin America for a global NGO between 2007 and 2016. The extent of the danger posed by state brokers – performing alone or in cahoots with organised crime teams – is evident from the numerous journalists I’ve spoken to in each Mexico and Honduras.
I first interviewed these reporters, and the organisations that help them, in 2018, then once more in 2022-23 (89 interviews in whole), to chart how journalists wrestle for cover and justice from the state within the face of rising challenges at each home and worldwide degree.
For each Padgett and Funes, the intimidation, threats and assaults from organised crime teams typically adopted them reporting on state brokers and their alleged hyperlinks with such teams. Organised crime teams have deeply infiltrated the material of society in lots of elements of Mexico and Honduras – together with politics, state establishments, justice and regulation enforcement, notably at a neighborhood degree.
In Padgett’s case, the suspected cartel threats got here after he revealed a e book and investigation into hyperlinks between state governments and drug cartels, together with drug cash for political campaigns in Tamaulipas and a surge in cartel-related violence in Morelos beneath a sure native administration.
Padgett had first joined the federal safety mechanism after he was attacked by police when filming a raid in central Mexico Metropolis in 2016. The police confiscated his telephone and arrested him.
He was later assigned an around-the-clock bodyguard after the Mexico Metropolis prosecutor’s workplace made accessible his contact particulars and his threat evaluation and safety plan – produced by the state programme that was purported to safeguard him – for inclusion within the court docket file on the 2017 assault on him on the college. This meant the criminals behind the assault had full entry to this data.
Mexican investigative journalist Humberto Padgett, on the launch of his e book Guerrero in January 2016.
Jose Mendez/EPA
Being a part of this safety programme didn’t cease the threats by state staff. In April 2024, whereas attempting to report from the scene of the homicide of a neighborhood mayoral candidate in Guanajuato state, Padgett was punched within the face by a police officer from the state prosecutor’s workplace, who additionally smashed his glasses and deleted his images.
Years earlier, he had been subjected to a protracted authorized battle by former Mexico state governor and presidential candidate Eruviel Ávila Villegas, who sued Padgett for “moral damages” to the tune of greater than half one million US {dollars}. His offence? A 2017 profile which talked about that the politician had attended events the place a bishop had sexually abused male minors.
Padgett ultimately received the case – however solely on enchantment, thanks to a professional bono authorized crew, after 18 months of stress and travelling to attend the hearings. This is part of a rising pattern of “strategic lawsuits against public participation” (Slapps) in Mexico and Latin America, geared toward silencing journalists and different important voices.
As Padgett put it: “[Even] once we manage to win, there are no consequences for the politicians who call us to a trial without merit – no consequences at all. Eruviel Ávila is still a senator for the PRI [Institutional Revolutionary Party]” – and he was not even accountable for prices.
Mexico’s federal authorities and military have additionally carried out unlawful surveillance of the cell phones of journalists and human rights defenders investigating federal authorities corruption and critical human rights violations on a number of events, together with by utilizing Pegasus spyware and adware.
In Honduras, Funes isn’t any stranger to state harassment both. In 2011, she was amongst round 100 journalists, lots of them ladies, who had been teargassed and overwhelmed with truncheons by officers of the presidential guard and the nationwide police throughout a peaceable protest towards journalist murders.
Lately, based on Funes, she and her crew at RI have been focused by cyberattacks and orchestrated smear campaigns on social media which have sought to tar them as being corrupt or related to felony gangs. She suspects the military is behind a few of these assaults since RI has written in favour of demilitarising the police. A number of RI crew members have been stopped at military checkpoints; once they have denounced this on TikTok or Fb, they’ve been flooded by detrimental feedback.
Profile of investigative journalist Wendy Funes, winner of the 2018 Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression journalism award.
RI has additionally been attacked by authorities supporters sad with its important protection of the Honduras president Xiomara Castro’s leftwing administration. In August 2024, Funes was threatened with prosecution by the governor of Choluteca, southern Honduras, over RI’s investigation into alleged involvement by native authorities officers in migrant trafficking. And earlier in 2025, Funes and a human rights activist had been subjected to misogynistic and sexist diatribes and threats by the top of customs for a similar regional division, for demanding justice for a murdered environmental defender.
Virtually half of all assaults on journalists in Mexico and Honduras are attributable to state brokers, notably on the native degree. In Mexico, the NGO Article 19 has attributed 46% of all such assaults over the past decade to state brokers together with officers, civil servants and the armed forces.
In Honduras, based on the Committee for Free Expression (C-Libre), 45% of assaults on journalists within the first quarter of 2024 had been attributed to state brokers, up from 41% in 2021. These embody the nationwide police, the Army Public Order Police, officers and members of the federal government.
Impunity is a truth of life
One key purpose for the failure of the journalist safety schemes in Mexico and Honduras is that they lack the ability to research, prosecute and punish these answerable for the assaults that triggered the journalists to enter the programmes within the first place.
Padgett is but to see justice, both for the assault on him by drug sellers on the college campus nearly eight years in the past or the outcomes of the official investigation into the Mexico Metropolis prosecutor workplace’s obvious leaking of his contact particulars to the assailants. When he requested the prosecutor’s workplace for an replace on its investigation in June 2024, he was advised it had been closed two years earlier. His request for a duplicate of the file was denied.
When he went to the workplace to ask why, he was detained by law enforcement officials. “This is justice in Mexico City,” he mentioned in a video he filmed throughout his arrest, including:
Drug dealing is allowed. My private information is leaked to the organised crime [group] that threatened to kill me and my household. Then the matter is shelved. I come to ask for my file and as a substitute of giving it to me, they take me to court docket. That’s the actuality as we speak.
Information report by Al Jazeera English (February 2023)
Padgett lodged a grievance and, following “a tortuous judicial process”, ultimately managed to get the investigation re-opened. However he says he has misplaced hope within the course of and the justice system on the whole. Even one thing so simple as submitting a report on the theft of his bullet-proof jacket through the armed assault in September 2024 has proved past the official answerable for the duty, so the safety programme has not changed it.
Funes says she reported one of many cyber-attacks on RI to the particular prosecutor established by Honduras in 2018 to research crimes towards journalists and human rights defenders. Funes supplied the identify and cell phone quantity utilized by the hacker. Nevertheless, she mentioned the case was later closed for “lack of merit”.
Beforehand, the official investigation into the 2011 assault on her and different ladies journalists had additionally been quietly shelved after the proof was “lost”. Funes says this put her off reporting subsequent incidents to the authorities:
What for? I simply need them to guard me … why waste my time? Actually, you get used to impunity, you normalise it.
There have been a number of vital advances in Mexico lately, together with the profitable prosecution of a few of these behind the 2017 homicide of two high-profile journalists, Javier Valdez and Miroslava Breach, however such circumstances stay the exception. Round 90% of assaults on journalists nonetheless go unprosecuted and unpunished by the state in each Mexico and Honduras, that means there may be little deterrent towards these crimes.
A tribute to Javier Valdez, one in all two journalists murdered in Mexico’s Sinaloa state in Might 2017.
Chico Sanchez/StockimoNews/Alamy
Safer, higher methods of working
Most of the journalists I’ve interviewed prioritise masking under-reported points referring to human rights and democracy, corruption, violence and impunity. They use in-depth, investigative journalism to attempt to reveal the reality about what is going on of their international locations – which is commonly obscured by the failings and corruption of the justice system and rule of regulation.
Many are growing safer, higher methods of working, with three methods having grown noticeably lately: constructing collaborations, looking for worldwide assist, and professionalising their methods of working.
Journalists from totally different media shops typically overcome skilled rivalries to collaborate on delicate and harmful tales. In Mexico, members of some journalists’ collectives and networks alert one another of safety dangers on the bottom, share and corroborate data, and monitor their members throughout dangerous assignments. Others journey as a bunch – when investigating the mass graves utilized by drug cartels, for instance.
In Mexico and more and more in Honduras, they publish controversial tales, resembling on critical human rights violations involving the state, in a couple of outlet concurrently to cut back the possibility of particular person journalists being focused in reprisal. Such collaborations construct belief, solidarity and mutual assist amongst reporters and editors – one thing that has historically been missing in each international locations.
More and more, worldwide media companions additionally play an vital function relating to the security of Mexican and Honduran journalists and amplifying public consciousness of the problems they report on – encouraging the mainstream media in their very own international locations to take discover and rising strain on their governments to behave.
In keeping with Jennifer Ávila, director of the Honduran investigative journalism platform ContraCorriente, transnational collaborations are a “super-important protection mechanism” as a result of they offer journalists entry to exterior editors and authorized help – in addition to assist leaving the nation if crucial.
Worldwide companions additionally deliver elevated sources. In Mexico and Honduras, as in different Latin American international locations, the principle supply of funding is authorities promoting and different state monetary incentives. However these include expectations about affect over editorial insurance policies and content material, so are usually not an choice for many impartial shops. Non-public promoting can also be difficult for these and different causes. So, most impartial media shops and journalistic tasks are closely depending on US and European donors such because the Nationwide Endowment for Democracy (Ned), Ford Basis and Open Society Foundations.
A lot of Latin America has excessive ranges of media focus, with the mainstream media usually being owned by a handful of rich people or households with wider enterprise pursuits – and shut financial and political hyperlinks to politicians and the state. Mixed with the strings of presidency promoting, this typically leads to “soft” censorship of the content material that these shops publish. Some journalists are escaping this both by establishing their very own media digital shops, like Funes, or by going freelance – as Padgett has determined to do following the assault on him in Cuitzeo in 2024.
On the similar time, there was a widespread elevating of requirements by way of elevated coaching in methods resembling journalistic ethics, making freedom of knowledge requests, digital and investigative journalism, and masking elections. This all helps to advertise “journalistic security” – utilizing data as a “shield in such a way that no one can deny what you’re saying”, based on Daniela Pastrana of the NGO Journalists on the Floor (PdP). It additionally helps counter the notion – and in some circumstances, actuality – of longstanding corruption in elements of the career.
Hostile atmosphere places progress in danger
Regardless of the promise of reworking journalism by way of rising collaboration, professionalisation and worldwide assist, the present outlook for journalists in Mexico and Honduras – and different international locations in Latin America – just isn’t encouraging. Hostile authorities rhetoric towards impartial reporters and media shops is on the rise, regardless of the presidents of each Mexico and Honduras having pledged to guard journalists and freedom of expression.
In Honduras, the hostile rhetoric in direction of journalists is rising within the run-up to the presidential elections in November. In keeping with Funes: “There is a violent public discourse from the government which is repeated by officials [and] prepares the ground for worse attacks on the press … This is dangerous.”
In each international locations, such attitudes on the prime are sometimes replicated by native politicians and residents, together with on-line, with the specter of violent discourse resulting in bodily violence. This hostility seems more likely to develop given the instance of Donald Trump’s aggressive and litigious angle in direction of journalists and the media in the US.
Certainly, the insurance policies of the second Trump administration are already jeopardising progress made by way of remodeling journalism in Mexico and Honduras. In late January 2025, the US authorities suspended worldwide assist and shuttered USAID, amid unsubstantiated accusations of fraud and corruption.
In keeping with the press freedom group Reporters With out Borders, the USAID freeze included greater than US$268m (£216m) that had been allotted to assist “independent media and the free flow of information” in 2025.
Ned’s chair, Peter Roskam, explains its authorized motion towards the Trump funding cuts.
Uncertainty about future funding has led to the quick suspension of operations and layoffs by many nonprofit media organisations in Mexico, Honduras and throughout the area. Whereas this seismic shift within the Latin American media panorama reinforces the pressing have to diversify its sources of funding, there isn’t any doubt that within the quick and even medium time period, it has dealt a critical blow to the event of free and impartial journalism and the security of all journalists.
In a area of more and more authoritarian leaders, it’s now quite a bit tougher to carry them accountable for corruption, human rights violations, impunity and different abuses.
Worldwide impotence
Anti-press violence and impunity are world issues, with greater than 1,700 journalists killed worldwide between 2006 and 2024 – round 85% of which went unpunished, based on Unesco.
Though worldwide organisations, safety mechanisms and strain may be vital instruments within the struggle towards anti-press violence and impunity, they’re in the end restricted in impression as a result of their reliance on the state to conform. Some journalists in Mexico and Honduras counsel the impression of such worldwide consideration may even be counter-productive, as a result of their governments’ rising hostility towards any criticism by worldwide organisations, journalists and different perceived opponents.
Twenty years in the past, Lydia Cacho, a famend journalist and girls’s rights activist, was arbitrarily detained and tortured in Puebla state, east-central Mexico, after publishing a e book exposing a corruption and youngster sexual exploitation community involving authorities and well-known businessmen. Unable to get redress for her torture by way of the Mexican justice system, Cacho ultimately took her case to the United Nations.
Lastly, in 2018, the UN Human Rights Committee dominated that her rights had been violated and ordered the Mexican state to re-open the investigation into the assault, and to provide her enough compensation. This judgment has led to a number of arrests of state brokers in Puebla, together with a former governor and chief of the judicial police and a number of other law enforcement officials, in addition to a public apology from the federal authorities.
Journalist Lydia Cacho talking on the 2020 Camden Convention.
However circumstances like Cacho’s are the exception. Securing rulings from worldwide our bodies requires sources and power, the assistance of NGOs or attorneys – and might take years. What’s extra, enforcement of worldwide choices depends on the state to conform.
Whereas worldwide strain was key to persuading the Mexican and Honduran states to arrange their authorities safety schemes for journalists and specialised prosecutors to research assaults towards them, these establishments have typically proved ineffective.
Resourcing is all the time a problem: usually, safety mechanisms and prosecutors’ places of work are underfunded and the employees are poorly skilled. Some our bodies have restricted mandates, resembling safety mechanisms that lack the ability to research assaults on journalists. Generally, these failings are believed to be deliberate. In keeping with Padgett, the Mexican journalist safety scheme has “political biases against those whom officials consider to be hostile to the regime”.
Certainly, many journalists and assist teams suspect the Mexican and Honduran governments don’t actually need these establishments to work. Because the pro-democracy choose Guillermo López Lone commented in regards to the repeated failure to safe convictions for crimes towards journalists and human rights defenders in Honduras: “These are international commitments [made] due to pressure, but there is no political will.”
López Lone, who was illegally faraway from his place after the 2009 coup in Honduras and solely reinstated as a choose after a years-long wrestle, together with a ruling by the Inter-American Courtroom of Human Rights, alleged that these establishments “play a merely formal role” in Honduras, as a result of they’ve been “captured by the political interests of the current rulers, and by criminal networks”.
Equally, based on Sara Mendiola, director of Mexico Metropolis-based NGO Propuesta Cívica, it’s not sufficient to speak a few lack of sources or coaching: “Even if you doubled the [state] prosecutors’ offices’ budgets, you’d still have the same impunity because the structures [that generate impunity] remain.”
Activism is a dangerous enterprise
It’s clear that in each Mexico and Honduras, regardless of the governments’ acknowledged dedication to freedom of expression, there’s a deep-seated ambivalence about how vital or fascinating it’s to guard journalists and media freedom.
The guts of this concern is the contradiction of the state as each protector and perpetrator – a state that doesn’t need to, or is incapable of, constraining or investigating itself and its allies. This in flip is linked to longstanding structural issues of corruption, impunity and human rights violations, and a legacy of controlling the media courting to pre-democracy days.
Activism by journalists towards this case – one other type of self-protection – takes numerous kinds, together with public protests and advocacy, and dealing for and establishing NGOs that assist colleagues in danger. More and more, activism additionally entails the approaching collectively of those that are the victims of violence.
Journalists within the Mexican metropolis of Acapulco demand extra safety within the face of elevated threats by organised crime teams, October 2020.
David Guzman Gonzalez/EPA-EFE
In Mexico Metropolis, teams of journalists displaced from their properties by threats and assaults, lots of whom find yourself with out a job or revenue, have fashioned collectives and networks to offer mutual assist and help colleagues in related circumstances. In Veracruz state, the Community in Reminiscence of and Wrestle for Killed and Disappeared Journalists was fashioned by the kin of the numerous such journalists in 2022.
However activism is a dangerous enterprise in Mexico and Honduras, opening journalists and their family members as much as additional repression and assaults by the state – and generally elevating questions on their impartiality and credibility. Whereas many journalists have taken half in activism out of necessity or desperation, in each international locations their foremost supply of optimism within the face of violence and impunity is journalism itself.
Journalism as the answer
Fortuitously, journalists like Padgett don’t surrender simply. After an eight-month hiatus following the assault in Cuitzeo and its aftermath, he now feels prepared to return to reporting.
Though he succeeded in getting the shelved investigation into the 2017 assault on him and subsequent information leak reopened, the dearth of any motion since means he’s determined to attract a line beneath this labyrinthine course of. He’s now searching for “alternative means of justice to compensate for the impunity”.
As part of the reparations, he has been promised a proper apology from the Mexico Metropolis Prosecutor’s Workplace (just like the apology obtained by Cacho). Such a ceremony just isn’t justice and will largely be symbolic, however Padgett feels it’s going to permit him to maneuver on and give attention to journalism once more – this time as a freelancer. He’s eager to make the purpose that Mexico stays “an extraordinary place to be a reporter”.
Regardless of the dearth of state safety and all the opposite challenges, journalists like Padgett and Funes are decided to maintain going – investigating their international locations’ ills, probing the foundation causes, remodeling their career. Their dedication provides a ray of hope for the emergence of a really free and impartial media in Mexico, Honduras and past.
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