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By KELIN DILLON

According to data from British human rights organization Article 19, violence against journalists in Mexico grew by 62.13 percent during the six-year term of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) when compared to the administration of his predecessor, former President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The group’s “Pending Rights, Six-Year Report on Freedom of Expression and the Right to Information in Mexico” claims that 3,408 attacks against the press were registered between December 1, 2018, to March 31, 2024, an average of one attack every 14 hours. 

This figure includes the murders of 49 journalists during AMLO’s six-year term and the disappearance of another four.

Article 19 claims that the rise in attacks against journalists in Mexico stems from a lack of national transparency, efforts at digital censorship from the legislative branch, and López Obrador’s personal attempts to discredit the national press during his daily morning press conferences and controversial “Who’s Who in Lies of the Week” segment.

“Article 19 documented that during this government the strategy of silencing journalists through violence persisted,” read the report. “A press under constant threat also continued to suffer from economic controls over the media due to the use of official advertising and the precariousness of media workers. As if that were not enough, news work faced unprecedented verbal hostility from the federal executive, reproduced by state and municipal authorities.”

The organization highlighted an alleged 248 smear campaigns against the press and 224 officially documented speeches disparaging journalists during the AMLO administration, saying that “we recorded 179 attacks during the morning press conferences and we also identified that municipal and state authorities from 20 Mexican states repeated the same stigmatizing discourse 62 times: ‘journalism underworld,’ ‘hypocrites,’ ‘fifí press,’ ‘conservatives,’ ‘puppets,’ ‘two-faced,’ ‘corrupt.’”

Likewise, the report found that the majority of attacks took place in the form of harassment, threats and improper use of public office, followed by censorship, physical harm, kidnapping and retaliation through judicial channels.