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Colleagues temporarily blocked the Guerrero state representation in Mexico City to protest the murder of journalist Nelson Matus. Photo: let’s get misinformed
(Oaxaca City, July 18, 2023, taz).- Logically, the media are to blame. With a campaign, they deliberately painted a picture that the state of Chiapas was very unsafe, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador recently said on Twitter. Clear case: All lies, we are actually doing well, but there are these journalists who are throwing dirt at the country. And of course him.
De facto, conditions have been prevailing in the south-east of the country for over a year which can without exaggeration be described as resembling a civil war. Thousands of residents have been expelled from their villages, activists have been murdered, and numerous regions suffer from the terror of organized crime on a daily basis. Formerly referred to as death squads, paramilitaries are independently acting, militarily equipped groups or units, which are mostly not integrated into the organization of the actual military and are deployed internally. Paramilitaries often act semi-legally or completely outside of the law, but in fact operate on behalf of or in the interests of an official institution or the government, which occurs above all in Colombia, but also in countries such as Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua or Venezuela. During Álvaro Uribe’s presidency in Colombia, the paramilitary umbrella organization AUC existed, which is responsible for at least 25,000 murders. Paramilitary groups are still killing in Colombia, often in cooperation with the police and army.
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Armed gangs even in San Cristóbal
Even in the tourist hotspot of San Cristóbal, criminal gangs roam the streets with guns. According to the human rights organization Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, violently armed groups are operating in Chiapas in order to enforce their social, political, economic and territorial control, among other things in the interest of fighting the government’s resistance.
The left-wing nationalist president wants nothing to do with this, not least because some of the local corrupt rulers are in his MoReNa party. In such statements, López Obrador generally emphasizes that the campaigns only aim to harm him. There was probably no room for that on Twitter. To explain his bold thesis, he wrote that Chiapas was only 26th out of 32 Mexican states in terms of the number of murders per 100,000 inhabitants. A limited explanation.
In the rest of the country, the murder figures are even higher
In any case, a look at the news of the last week proves him right. On Monday, several masked men raided a market hall in the central Mexican city of Toluca, shot dead nine people, spilled gasoline and set fire to the building. Bombs dropped on the side of the road killed six people in the western state of Jalisco on Tuesday.
Also earlier in the week (July 10-11), the Los Ardillos criminal cartel, which controls significant parts of Guerrero State, mobilized 2,000 people from surrounding villages. They paralyzed the state capital, Chilpancingo, to secure the release of two of its members. Previously, six taxi drivers died there in fights between the “Ardillos” and the “Tlacos” – two of them burned in their cars. And so forth.
Journalism is life-threatening
For López Obrador, these stories are certainly part of a journalists’ campaign. For example, from Yener de los Santos, who keeps writing about the Ardillos and also reported on the incidents of the past week. For colleagues like him, their work is dangerous. In April, strangers broke into Santos’s home and stole three cameras, a video camera and his computer.
Radio presenter Pablo Salgado was murdered near Chilpancingo in June. In July, in the city of Tepic, in western Nayarit state, it struck La Jornada correspondent Luis Martín Sánchez. He was found tied up and covered with plastic bags. The perpetrators had left a message on his chest. On Saturday, July 15th, the journalist was born in Acapulco Nelson Hair shot.
López Obrador’s ability to ignore and rewrite reality never fails to impress. It would be nice if you didn’t have to take his stories seriously and could dismiss them as real satire. But the opposite is the case: the majority of the population wants to hear exactly that. In any case, so far there is no doubt that the candidate of his party will emerge victorious in the presidential elections next year.