Vital Doc on threat to Mexican journalists

A horror story is unfolding in Mexico, written in blood and ink.

Since 2000, more than 160 journalists have been killed across the country. More than 30 other people have disappeared and many more have received death threats for simply trying to do their job, which is to hold the powerful to account.

This extraordinary reality is highlighted in the essential documentary silent statedirected by Santiago Maza and produced by Mexican stars Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal. The film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June, began streaming on Netflix on Thursday.

The film is based on the accounts of several investigative journalists who have been forced to hide or even flee to the US because of their work, such as Jesús Medina, Juan de Dios García Davish, María de Jesús Peters and Marcos Vizcarra. Medina upset the powers that be by reporting on illegal logging and mining operations in the Mexican state of Morelos, south of Mexico City.

silent state shows closed-circuit television footage of an incident in September 2017 in which a man in a vehicle approached Medina and told him: “You’re playing with the government, son of a bitch. You’re going to get screwed.” Medina’s wife also received threats. She received a phone call from someone who warned her to advise her husband to take his research efforts down “a couple of notches.”

An American audience might assume, before seeing silent statethat the greatest threat to Mexican journalists would come from reporting on drug lords. Maybe so, but what’s surprising about the film is just how much threats they come from those who protect the interests of elected officials. The movie introduced me to a new term: narcopoliticianor narco-politics, intended to describe a state of affairs where the lines between politicians and traffickers have blurred. The authorities and the cartels are part of the same power structure that sees the meddling of journalists as a nuisance that needs to be wiped out.

“There is an impunity pact,” says Vizcarra, who has denounced human rights abuses in Culiacán, in the state of Sinaloa. Thousands of people have disappeared there over a period of years, many dragged into mass graves, presumably victims of drug traffickers.

Vizcarra filmed an incredible shootout between elements of the army, municipal police and cartels in Culiacán that left 29 people dead, including 10 soldiers. At one point, his vehicle was confiscated and burned by a gang of kids who said they had permission to kill him.

“It’s been a horrible day. My worst mistake was trying to report what was happening,” he says in a live interview with a television network. “Doing my job was my worst mistake.”

There is a subset of people in Mexico and elsewhere in the world who are drawn to the need to investigate and expose the conditions in which they and their neighbors live: to uncover the wrongs, to implicitly point the way to a more just and equitable to organize ourselves. . The tragedy – and it is not limited to Mexico, of course – is that this altruistic impulse can be fatal.

It is a sad testimony that things have reached such a dire state in Mexico that in 2012 the government adopted a law establishing a formal “protection mechanism” for journalists and human rights defenders. In the case of Medina and others in the film, the Mechanism did nothing more than collect some expenses for them to hide. Not exactly a lifesaver. In reference to the mechanismsays Juan de Dios García Davish, “You call the panic button and they don’t answer.”

Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in office from 2018 to 2024, might be expected to be a staunch supporter of the fourth estate, being a man of the left. But the documentary describes him as hostile to journalist scrutiny and willing, at best, to remain silent in the face of threats to journalists. One can only hope that his successor, Pres. Claudia Scheinbaum, who took office earlier this month, will be more willing to protect journalists, but as a political disciple of López Obrador, that may be waiting too long.

Stylistically, silent state departs from a strict “truth doctors and news archive” approach in evocative ways. BEAK>, the English electronic rock group, composed an original score that conveys a menacing vibe, shifting the tone from simple reportage to something more like a political thriller. Maza incorporates a recurring visual motif: blood or dark sap flowing down tree trunks, over thorny cacti and across the dusty terrain, a metaphor for bloodshed and the inexorable seepage of corruption. Another recurring image – a burning newsstand, orange flames shooting into a dark sky – provides a poignant corollary to journalists describing what their vocation has cost them.

Carmen Aristegui, the prominent Mexican journalist and news anchor whose fame may insulate her to some degree from risk, provides a coda to the film, addressing the interests of a democratic nation where journalists face usually in mortal danger. “When you kill a journalist, you kill society’s right to be informed,” he says. “This needs to be said over and over again.”