The journalists of Juárez: “What do you want from us?”

22/09/2010

Every profession has its aphorisms which with time and repetition add to an ever-expanding list of clichés; the obscure become a type of shibboleth or test—like a secret handshake that proves membership in an exclusive club. The more common are expressed ad nauseum so that the masses can easily identify a raison d’être. Sometimes they even become decrees—or oaths.

Doctors have theirs.

They trace it back to ancient Greece.

When I think of journalists, I don’t have to go back that far.

Around the turn of the 20th century, as Finley Peter Dunne was publishing his Mr. Dooley articles in Chicago, he came up with a variation of this: ‘to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’

Over time it gave muckrakers everywhere a clever reply to everyone’s favorite question: What do you do?

It’s noble, inspirational—almost heroic—and for present-day journalists in Ciudad Juárez, completely unrealistic. I limit the scope to Juárez instead of the state of Chihuahua or even all of Mexico, because the recent actions taken by those at Juárez’s El Diario deserve special attention:

http://www.diario.com.mx/notas.php?f=2010/09/19&id=ce557112f34b187454d7b6d117a76cb5

When Dunne wrote his political satire, he did so knowing he might make some enemies—just not the type of enemies who would prevent him from doing his job. Writing about American politics wasn’t and isn’t something that keeps its practitioners up at night worrying about their safety. And even as many journalists, like soldiers, go into warzones knowing they could lose their lives, they often do so with a sense of perceived neutrality; the danger is in the environment, not in the reaction to what they report.

In Juárez the façade of safety that neutrality offered is long gone, leaving the staff at El Diario to ask in a recent editorial, “What do you want from us?”

The “you” here means the cartels—or “the de facto authorities” as they call them:

“You are, at the moment, the de facto authorities in this city, because the legally-instituted authorities haven’t been able to do anything to stop our colleagues from dying, despite our having reiterated our demands repeatedly.”

The colleagues to which they’re referring are Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco and Armando Rodríguez Carreón. Orozco, a 21 year-old photographer, was shot with one of his friends last Thursday—luckily this friend and colleague, also a photographer, survived. Carreón was murdered in the presence of his wife and nine-year-old child in 2008. Not surprisingly, the case remains open.

The Committee to Protect Journalists recently released a report entitled “Silence or Death in Mexico’s Press”. Their statistics support the title: “More than 30 journalists and media workers have been murdered or have vanished since December 2006. As vast self-censorship takes hold, Mexico's future as a free and democratic society is at risk.”

El Diario stated in their editorial that they aren’t giving up; they’re just no longer willing to see their staff added to La Nota Roja—the section in Mexican dailies that describes recent violent crimes.

A press itself afflicted can do nothing to comfort their fellow citizens in a period of violence that long ago surpassed excessive. I’d contend that the Committee to Protect Journalists has understated the significance of the threat. If the imposed silence is allowed to prevail, Mexico’s “future as a free and democratic society” won’t be at risk, it will have disappeared altogether.

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