Violence against journalists in Mexico is a crisis for free expression. We’re preserving their reporting in a digital archive.
This article is part of the Free Speech Project , a collaboration between Future Tense and the Tech, Law, & Security Program at American University Washington College of Law that examines the ways technology is influencing how we think about speech.
The 36-year-old vlogger appeared on my screen wearing a curly black wig with a big yellow bow, fake oversize glasses, and a green dress. Caricaturizing a homemaker, her signature over-the-top costume transformed Leslie Ann Pamela Montenegro del Real into her online persona: a satirical YouTuber best known as Nana Pelucas. From 2012 to 2018, Montenegro del Real and her husband ran an online outlet called El Sillón magazine from Mexico’s popular beachside city of Acapulco. Nana Pelucas was the host and reporter of El Sillón’s news shows.
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“Let’s start straight with the gossip,” said a smiling Nana Pelucas as I clicked Play. “We’ll begin with the dumbass—I mean, with my favorite kid: Chuchito cara de moco,” said the vlogger, referring to Acapulco’s then mayor, Jesús Evodio Velázquez Aguirre, as a “snot-face.” In character, Montenegro del Real criticized the mayor’s annual public address, pointing to the list of unfinished public works projects he had promised. “This snot-face didn’t even have enough support for reelection, and now he thinks he’ll become a senator,” she added, breaking out in raucous laughter.
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The crimes against them are expansive attacks on free expression and participation in civic life.
This sort of video was typical for Montenegro del Real, whose satirical content included funny skits on local politics and interviews with local businessmen and politicians. But less than six months after she posted this video, Montenegro del Real was killed. On Feb. 5, 2018, she was dining with her husband in the restaurant they owned. Two armed men walked straight to their table and shot her three times. They then fled the scene.
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Between 2000 and 2022, 157 journalists were killed in Mexico. These statistics track murders of journalists that were likely connected to their work, and they make Mexico one of the deadliest countries for reporters in the world, often compared with countries at war. The difference is that in Mexico, reporters are not killed by airstrikes or bombs; they are not unplanned casualties. Instead, they are targeted and killed execution-style, just like Montenegro del Real. Many of the murdered journalists are not the hard-hitting investigative reporters you might have in mind, juggling whistleblowers and carefully pulling together sweeping exposés of corruption. Those reporters are targeted too, often via sophisticated methods like the spyware Pegasus—but in my research, I’ve found that most often the journalists who are murdered are those who worked locally and precariously: reporters who founded their own media outlets—blogs, websites, and Facebook pages—in which they posted about daily life in their towns. They reported on everything from a fight between drunken neighbors and the town’s soccer match to elections and roads.
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In 2018, six months after Montenegro del Real’s still-unsolved murder, I found myself staring at her YouTube videos, playing one after another, unable to look away from my screen, trying to figure out how to pull together a comprehensive dossier of her work. This, I hoped, would help me understand what had led to her murder.
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I closed the tab for El Sillón magazine, shocked that someone as creative and funny—and, above all, so seemingly harmless—had been killed. I returned to my working file. Displayed on the screen was a list of (at the time) 118 names, among them Montenegro del Real’s: fellow journalists who had been murdered in my country, along with links to the outlets where they had published before their untimely deaths. That list was the beginning of what would become the first and only archive that preserves the work of Mexico’s murdered journalists.
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I perused the list again, as I had done dozens of times, overwhelmed and unsure of how or where to start the colossal task I had set out to do. After some aimless procrastination, and without much further thought, I clicked on a different link and began cataloging the work of another late colleague. Starting there seemed as good as any alternative.
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The murders of Mexican journalists are rarely solved. Even when they do end in arrests, only hit men are ever prosecuted, leaving the masterminds to roam free, which means that motives are almost never established. That is why I wanted to create a database ripe with qualitative information—clues, if you will—that could help shed some light on unsolved cases and serve as a tool to study patterns of violence. If the investigations that these journalists were working on were so damning that someone had killed them to keep them quiet, then we needed to pull back the curtain.
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But now, after five years of reading, watching, and listening to the work of killed reporters, I realize I was largely wrong about the why behind the gruesome and ever-growing list of murdered journalists. The work these journalists produced before their deaths, in the vast majority of cases, was not hard-hitting, Hollywood-style investigative journalism. Instead, it was daily, unwavering, and often opinionated hyperlocal news and citizen reporting that unequivocally denounced abuses of power and was often published online. It was low-budget, passion-driven, community-centered—and brutally dangerous.
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Before being stabbed to death in 2019, local journalist Nevith Condés Jaramillo, from the state of Mexico, did one Facebook Live after another criticizing the lack of medicine in the regional hospital, calling out the mayor for half-built public schools, and demanding that a street with a huge pothole be fixed. In early 2016, before being shot to death in front of his house, Francisco Pacheco Beltrán, from Guerrero, published op-eds on his website complaining about the poor quality of public services in his town. One week before his murder, Pacheco Beltrán wrote about a neighborhood where residents had no running water, criticizing the mayor for “living with excess” while turning his back on residents. Similarly, Samir Flores Soberanes, from Morelos, used his community radio to rally people to protest the construction of a gas pipeline—until he was killed at dawn outside his house in 2019.
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In their reporting, the archive demonstrates over and over again, these local journalists called out negligent politicians, unpopular kingpins, and corrupt businessmen; they demanded better public services and accountability. They didn’t uncover secret documents or find smoking guns. Their work often overlapped with activism. The crimes against them are expansive attacks on free expression and participation in civic life, in many different forms.
A few months after I first tried to start documenting Montenegro del Real’s work, I mustered the courage to click back into the webpage for El Sillón magazine. When I did, I found myself once again shocked: The website I had visited mere weeks before no longer existed. Its domain was up for sale, the ad on my screen noted, after payment for it had failed. The work of killed journalists—often published on their own online outlets or social media platforms—tends to be self-financed. They rarely made a living from their journalism, and most had other sources of income, like driving a cab or selling tacos. That is also why, after they’re killed, their work often disappears.
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Luckily, not all of Montenegro del Real’s legacy was lost. Most of her videos are still available on YouTube, where people from all over the world have expressed their shock over her murder and left their condolences in the comments. But few other journalists posted on YouTube, so Montenegro del Real is an exception.
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Pacheco Beltrán ran an online outlet that was lost, along with his work, after payment for the domain suddenly stopped, years after his death. Ricardo Monlui Cabrera, killed in 2016 in Veracruz, migrated his print paper online a few years before being murdered; months after the crime, his website disappeared too. Rubén Pat Cauich, José Guadalupe Chan Dzib, and Francisco Romero Díaz—killed between 2018 and 2019 in Quintana Roo—worked together on a breaking news site hosted on Facebook. Their work was lost after being flagged as sensitive content and subsequently taken down.
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When I think back to 2018, I have flashbacks of sitting up in bed at 2 a.m., overcome by dread and angst, cataloging clips while thinking I would never be able to preserve all that soon-to-vanish work: all those videos and radio programs, stories and interviews; all the reporting comprising Mexico’s recent history and the clues to dozens of unsolved murders.
But I kept at it, and by late 2019, when I launched the archive, I had been able to hire a team, and together we were able to preserve more than 12,000 clips from 43 journalists. Today, as a small nonprofit, we continue to read, catalog, and preserve the work authored by killed journalists—a number that, sadly, keeps growing in Mexico. As that number grows, I am more convinced than ever that this digital repository will be an invaluable tool for qualitative analysis that can help design better public policy (in partnership with public and private organizations) to prevent violence against local reporters and citizen journalists. Mexico’s federal government and some states have special programs to prevent violence against reporters and activists that could, for example, use the data to identify moments of increased risk in specific places. Similarly, collaborations with companies like Meta could help journalists evaluate risk based on the reach of their content, the sensitivity of its timing in their local context, and the reaction to it.
We owe it to murdered journalists to preserve and engage with their work. It is key to honoring their legacy, and to protecting the Mexican journalists who continue to bluntly speak truth to power with very few resources, relying heavily on technology to spread and amplify their cries for justice.
Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.
Source: Slate
