Essential tools for reporting in Mexico: a notebook, camera, and contraceptive pill

It was May, and I was at the Club de Periodistas de Mexico (Mexico Press Club), speaking with a group of female crime journalists in Mexico City about the challenges they face while reporting in the country.

I was part of a ground assessment project for the Coalition for Women in Journalism, a worldwide initiative I cofounded to create a peer-support network for female journalists. During the trip, I sat in roundtable discussions, newsrooms, and private meetings with Mexican female journalists and photojournalists. Some of the women described how they work in what they called a “machismo” society, frequently facing harassment by sources, authorities, and even, at times, their colleagues.

“We carry our bodies with our notebooks,” one woman said. “Both are equally encumbering.”

“How much do you get paid?” I asked the women.

“Not enough,” they said.

According to surveys by Article 19 in Mexico and Fotoreporteros MX, some journalists who freelance for local media in states outside of Mexico City make $1 a day. Even in the capital, salaries for local journalists are very low. In order to survive, many have to work other jobs. Some work as journalists during the day and drive taxis at night. One journalist sells tacos when she’s not working. And a few journalists, yes, get into bed with the cartels as a means of making money, the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based international press freedom organization that documents attacks on the press worldwide, has found.

I learned the risks these journalists have to take and the silence in which they must work. I met people who speak openly about the issues in this country, including violence and corruption, and I learned that the women among them were almost always targeted and bullied. The stories were shocking and consistent with one another: harassment by police, by cartel members, by colleagues, and by sources.

If journalists are caught by a drug cartel or corrupt police, they have to pay their way out of trouble—a bribe, of sorts, for their safe exit. But for female journalists in Mexico, there is a different phenomenon at play. Unlike men, who may be asked for money, women are asked for bribes in sexual favors—or a “body price.” This is so common in some states in Mexico, especially where drug cartels rule, that it is part of the logistics that journalists factor in when they do their reporting.

One photojournalist who freelances for Reuters told me, “I carry my notebook, my pen, and a box of contraceptive pills.” That is how she has chosen to prepare herself in case of rape in the field by a source or by somebody who doesn’t want her there.

“It is absolutely likely every time I am in the field,” she said of rape. “Every time.”

Working in a ‘machismo’ society
In a country that is harsh to journalists and human rights defenders in general, “it becomes a dual challenge if you are a woman in this very deeply ‘machismo’ society,” said Monika Gonzalez, a local journalist and cofounder of Fotoreporteros MX, a group of photojournalists who work for better coordination and safety of colleagues. Journalists in Mexico, she said, are “intimidated by the state and used as political pawns by drug cartels in different parts of the country. Gender puts women reporters right in the middle of the two-pronged risk.”

On the surface, the government of Mexico is making an effort to improve press freedom and sexual harassment in the country, though the country remains one of the most dangerous in the world for journalists and activists. Since 1992, at least 36 journalists have been killed in Mexico in relation to their work, CPJ research shows. Dozens more have died in unclear circumstances. Mexico ranks eighth on CPJ’s 2015 Impunity Index, which highlights countries where journalists are murdered and their assailants go free.

“Often, the abuses, torture, and sexual harassment that journalists—especially women—face go unreported,” said Lucia Verga, a rights advocate with UK-based freedom-of-expression group Article 19 in Mexico City. At the federal level, there are departments set up to support human rights defenders and ensure that perpetrators of violence against press and women are punished but, according to Verga, that rarely happens. “It is not uncommon for female victims to not go to the police to report the crime,” she said. “Most feel they would waste their time—or worse, get into trouble with the authorities.”

When women talk about their harassment publicly or try to report such crimes, “government officials and local authorities react in different ways, at times putting the journalists in a further dangerous situation,” said Paulina Gutiérrez, who looks at cases of online and physical attacks of women journalists for Article 19. “But, most important, police often resist even registering the crime.”

There were 84 attacks against female journalists in 2015, according to a report by Article 19 called “Miedo,” or “Fear,” making the year “the most violent period for women in the press in the last seven years.” And such attacks have a targeted, effective outcome: “The particular nature of attacks that target female journalists cause distinct harm to their psychosocial well-being and their personal and professional lives. Women are more likely to receive threats of sexualized violence or threats that are directed toward their family or loved ones. This harassment draws on pre-existing gender tensions, with the aim to stigmatize, ridicule, and discredit the work and views of women journalists.”

Beyond describing several cases of police harassment against women reporters, Article 19 also reported cases of editors intimidating female employees—in one situation, asking for sexual favors—and female journalists being trolled on the Internet by anonymous account holders.

‘You know what’s next’
At a coffee shop in Roma Norte, an upscale Mexico City neighborhood, I sat with a group of female journalists. We drank Turkish Kahvesi, smoked cigarettes, and talked. One journalist in her 30s joined us and related her compelling account of recent sexual abuse. She asked to remain anonymous because she feared retribution.

The journalist had been investigating links between drug cartels and local government officials in Veracruz this year when she began receiving threats from both sides. The journalist said she fled Veracruz to Mexico City, once considered a safe haven in the country.

In Mexico City one day in April, she said, unknown men pulled her down on the street by her hair, grabbing her breasts, “playing” with them, “playing” with her whole body, and, after what she said was a long time, raping her. “You know what’s next,” one of the two men whispered in her ear as they left her, partially undressed, late that night.

She said she realized that next time she could be killed.

What was most stunning to the others was that this had happened to her in Mexico City. “The war has come to our safe haven,” one said.

The journalist said she was worried that reporting the crime to the police would get her into greater trouble than she’d already faced. Some journalists believe that police in Mexico cooperate with perpetrators or are “on the take,” the group told me. Many politicians, mayors, or officials working in the government who are sometimes accused as perpetrators of such crimes are protected by a powerful political system in the state. According to the National Institute for Women, which was set up by the government in Mexico, more than 80 percent of sexual assaults in Mexico are unreported. The University of the Americas Puebla reported that less than 5 percent of all criminals face sentencing in Mexico.

There were five colleagues at that table who would vouch for the authenticity of the journalist’s account, yet no one felt safe putting it on the record with her real name or offering her any protection. Later that month, when I discussed the story with other people I met, I got mixed responses. “You never know who she works for,” one said, reflecting common suspicion and occasional reality that so many people, including journalists, are entangled with the drug cartels.

“It is hard to verify a story like that,” said another. 

Journalism is often called the first draft of history, the information skeleton upon which historians construct the body of their narrative. But when incidents of harassment are unrecorded, history reflects a diminished version of reality. So what we don’t know about Mexico, we may never know.

The case of Lydia Cacho defines a lack of justice
In 2005, Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, one of the most well-known investigative journalists and human rights activists in Mexico, was arrested outside of a high-security shelter she had set up for abused women in Cancun, a Caribbean resort city known for its touristy beach resorts and Mezcal cocktails.

During the hours-long trip Cacho took with police from Cancun to a police station in Puebla State, she said, she was verbally abused and insulted in language that had both emotionally hurtful and sexual connotations. When they reached Puebla, she was jailed on charges of defamation, which were later dropped. That year, Cacho had written a book in which she exposed a pedophile ring in Cancun. In the book, she accused Kamel Nacif Borge, a rich business tycoon who had influence and close allies in the government, of paying for the defense for another businessman who she said lured underage girls to his home and coerced them into having sex with him and his friends.

A series of private phone conversations were leaked between Nacif and Mario Marín, the governor of Puebla at the time, in which the two “congratulated each other for Cacho’s arrest and referred to her in derogatory terms,” according to The New York Times. Nacif denied any wrongdoing.

Cacho filed a suit alleging her civil rights had been violated, and the case went to the Mexico Supreme Court. The media aggressively covered the case, which went on for years.

Then, in a country like Mexico, where the political elite protect the crimes of the business elite, the leaked tape was disqualified in court hearings despite an investigation that concluded that at least 30 government officials, including the governor, had conspired to harass Cacho. In November 2007, the Supreme Court ruled against her.

When high-profile journalists like Cacho do not get justice, it defines the scope and scale of what the women in Mexico are up against.

Gonzalez of Fotoreporteros MX pointed out that not every journalist can take on her bullies. That was what was unique in Cacho’s case was that she had the influence and connections to leak the tapes and go to the Supreme Court. But when still, after all that, her trial failed to find justice, it took away the confidence and the optimism of female journalists and human rights defenders who had hoped to find strength through her fight. “This is not a problem of the past,” Gonzalez said. “The tentacles of a ‘machismo’ culture have bitten us all these years and still come and bite us every day.”

Gonzalez is among the reporters who have supported each other in times of crisis. That’s what they do at Fotoreporteros MX. “We try to help colleagues deal with issues of harassment and safety, especially when it is very difficult for them to report the crimes,” she said.

Forced into silence
About a hundred years after the Mexican revolution, violence still ravages the country. Mutilated bodies are dumped on pavements at night. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people are disappeared each year. Most of the civilian population struggles in poverty. Crime rates are ever increasing, and targeted killings committed by drug cartels continue with impunity. Women who are at the forefront of documenting the violence are in danger every day.

“Every single day,” said Ginnette Riquelme, a freelance photojournalist who works in Mexico, considered a good base for freelance reporters covering Latin America and the U.S. border with Mexico.

“Mexico is very tough to navigate as a woman,” Riquelme said. “The toughest part is to report on harassment when it happens to you. We have seen horrible treatment toward our colleagues when they have reported on the issue of harassment. They are treated mercilessly by the corrupt system and often deal with the horror on their own.”

Gonzalez recalled a former colleague who worked at El Universal, one of the leading papers in Mexico. “She was harassed by her boss and, when she made a complaint, she was transferred to a smaller department,” she said. “She was an excellent reporter, but the whole ordeal became so stressful that she felt endangered in her own organization, among her own colleagues. She eventually left journalism.”

The message that journalist received was not in print. It was in what would never be written.

“Don’t you think it’s strange?” Riquelme asked. “We take risks to speak for the right of others. Still, we cannot risk speaking out when our personal and physical freedoms are violated. If we do, it will be the end of our careers.”