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World Report - Mexico

• Area: 1 964 375 sq km
• Population: 103 million
• Language: Spanish
• Head of state: Felipe Calderon (since December 2006)

Mexico is one of the hemisphere's most dangerous countries for the media. Drug cartels and corrupt officials are implicated in most of the crimes of violence against journalists, which almost always go unpunished. As a result, journalists often censor themselves and some have to flee into exile.

More than 50,000 troops have been mobilized for the federal offensive against drug trafficking that President Felipe Calderón launched in December 2006. The toll after five years is more than 40,000 dead nationwide, and more than 15,000 in 2010 alone. This undeclared war is being accompanied by a parallel bloody war among the cartels for control of the trafficking. The result has been a tragic deterioration in the working environment for journalists.

Although this situation affects the entire country, the northern states that are the traditional cartel strongholds are the most exposed. The Sinaloa, Gulf and Juárez Cartels have been on the annually updated Reporters Without Borders list of Predators of Press Freedom for years.

Mexico continues to be the western hemisphere's most dangerous country for the media, with a total of 77 journalists murdered since 2000 and 13 disappearing since 2003. Mexico and Iraq ranked jointly as the second-most dangerous countries in the world for journalists in 2010, after Pakistan. Nineteen journalists have lost their lives in this wave of terror since the start of 2010, eight of them in apparent connection with their work.

None of these crimes has even been properly solved by the police and judicial authorities. The Special Prosecutor's Office for Crimes against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) has obtained no significant result since its creation in February 2006. The escalating terror has left more and more threatened journalists with no choice but to censor themselves or flee into exile.

There has at least been progress on the legislative front with the decriminalization of media offences at the federal level, promulgated in April 2007. An agreement on the new "protection mechanisms" for journalists was ratified at the federal level in November 2010 but its implementation is still pending.

Updated in August 2011

Topics: Drug trafficking, Militias, Freedom of information, Freedom of expression,