Israel Hernandez Sosa was sitting in his office on the busy floor of an otherwise unassuming gray building in downtown Xalapa, Veracruz, when his phone rang. “It was a mayor who wanted to tell me he was so upset by a reporter’s stories that he wanted to fuck him over,” recalled Hernandez Sosa in an interview. “That’s how he said it, he used those exact words.”
Veracruz is a Mexican coastal state best known for its hand-harvested bold coffee and its regional jarocho folk music. Shaped like a crescent moon and roughly the size of Ireland, Veracruz is wedged between a 462-mile coastline along the Gulf of Mexico and the Sierra Madre Oriental mountain range. The landscape changes rapidly throughout its long territory when driving from south to north: from dunes on the beach to thick jungles and foggy forests to a snow-covered volcano that attracts around 2,000 climbers attempting to summit every year. But in recent years, Veracruz has come to be known as the most lethal state for reporters in Mexico. A total of 31 reporters have been killed here and five more have gone missing, according to the international press freedom group Article 19. About 1 in 5 reporters killed in Mexico died in Veracruz.
Looking out of his window on the third floor, Hernandez Sosa could see the sprawling city beneath its familiar clouds and rain. “I tried to calm him down,” he said, “until he agreed to meet me in two days.” Hernandez Sosa asked for a copy of the stories that had bothered the mayor and started looking into the case. As the call with the mayor continued, the rest of the rooms around him inside the State Commission for the Attention and Protection of Journalists (its Spanish acronym is CEAPP) in Veracruz filled with the sound of bureaucratic bustle: secretaries typing away, attorneys preparing the defense of a reporter for court and other employees setting up meetings.
Two days later, Hernandez Sosa would travel to the mayor’s town and sit down with him and the reporter to serve as a mediator. That simple meeting, where both men could confront each other with an arbiter, might save the reporter’s life.
Hernandez Sosa has brown skin and thick, black hair that he parts on one side and fixes in place with a thick layer of gel, a strong handshake and the ability to offer his undivided attention when he engages in conversation. He is the head of CEAPP.
Created in 2012, the mission of this small but hectic commission is to keep reporters out of harm’s way. CEAPP was the first state-based institution of its kind; the federal equivalent had been created some months prior. (Between 2000 and 2012, 67 reporters were killed in the entire country, 14 in Veracruz.) From the beginning, CEAPP was bestowed with legal autonomy, allowing its board to decide anything and everything about how it operates, from what programs it pursues to how it spends its resources. One of CEAPP’s flagship programs is the journalism award it gives away every year to recognize reporters’ investigative work and to promote professionalism among the press corps. CEAPP also offers courses for ethical reporting. When a reporter is threatened, it conducts risk analyses and determines how best to keep that reporter safe; they can provide them with anything from bulletproof vests to panic buttons, police surveillance and surveillance cameras, depending on each case.
Violence against reporters in Veracruz started with a few scattered cases. The first record of a journalist killed in the state dates back to 2002. During the remainder of the aughts, four more reporters were killed there. The following decade brought more frequent and cruel killings. Four reporters were killed in 2011 alone. One went missing. Reporters were being abducted by armed groups, assailants broke into journalists’ homes to shoot them, bodies of those taken were found on the sides of streets, sometimes riddled with bullet wounds, sometimes decapitated. Culprits were rarely found.
The following year, in 2012, five journalists were killed and one more went missing in the span of just four months. Reporters from Veracruz were asking for guns — as the former director of a Mexico City-based nonprofit once told me — not to defend themselves but so that they could take their own lives to avoid being tortured. During the spike of violence against the press in Veracruz, the state government created CEAPP.
Hernandez Sosa, who now leads CEAPP, was not always a government official: He was once a local reporter. His first gig was as a 13-year-old boy covering soccer for his hometown newspaper. As killings rose in the state, he started covering violence-related stories.
In 2014, when he was 22, a local reporter was abducted outside his kids’ school. His body was found a week later, buried with two more people. To demand justice, a group of journalists organized protests and marches in Veracruz. Hernandez Sosa took part in the demonstrations. Shortly after, unidentified men started dropping by his apartment, where they took photos of his place and his car and asked his neighbors about his schedule. Then they began following him. “I later found out they were people close to the Ministry of Public Safety spying on me,” Hernandez Sosa said the first time I interviewed him, in 2019. After learning he was being spied on and harassed, he decided to lay low for some time, slowing down his work and picking “harmless stories” to cover.
Eventually, he returned to his usual beat, covering cases of “disappeared” young men, erased from the face of the earth, and broke stories of recently discovered clandestine mass graves full of unidentified bodies. He began working as a local reporting partner — he termed himself a fixer — for Al Jazeera, went to get special training on human rights reporting in Colombia and became a correspondent for a national radio program. His journalistic career was going well, until March 2017, when he was caught in the crossfire of opposing union workers during a violent power struggle at the factory of Tenaris Tamsa, a pipe manufacturer in Veracruz. When he was finally operated on, two days later, doctors were able to extract the bullet still lodged between his hip and femur. When he finally made a full recovery, CEAPP’s former director offered Hernandez Sosa a position in his team.
The reporter then became a risk analyst in 2018. He was now the first point of contact for reporters in harm’s way. After listening to threatened reporters’ stories, he assessed the level of risk, then recommended what kind of protection protocol each of them needed.
As Hernandez Sosa documented threat after threat, he began noticing a pattern: surprisingly, only a few (4%) came from organized crime groups or cartels, while a striking 29% could be traced to public officials, including mayors, municipal councillors, police officers and security forces. Indeed, Hernandez Sosa was about to learn how dangerous mayors could be from a single case.
Celestino Ruiz Vazquez, a local reporter in Actopan, a 41,000-resident town in central Veracruz, covered the news in an earnest albeit blunt manner. He wrote a story about the mayor and his wife firing more than 40 employees to hire friends and kin instead, even if they had no previous experience in public office. Some of the new hires didn’t even work at the town hall but received a salary regardless. Days later, unknown assailants broke into Ruiz Vazquez’s garage and smashed the windows of his car.
Undeterred, the reporter published another story. “Actopan’s mayor orders the beating of town hall employees,” it read. The mayor was cutting employees’ salaries and had his bodyguards intimidate and beat them up if they complained, or worse, if they spoke to Ruiz Vazquez. Then his car was shot at, which prompted a meeting with CEAPP.
After meeting with Hernandez Sosa, CEAPP assigned a police car to survey the reporter’s house. Ruiz Vazquez was monitored constantly and, with police protection, he kept reporting on local politics. He ran a story about alleged embezzlement. Days later, on a Friday, Hernandez Sosa received another call from the reporter. He had been threatened again and thought police surveillance wasn’t enough to keep him safe. They agreed to meet again on Tuesday, to reevaluate his protection protocol.
But Ruiz Vazquez never showed.
That night, a group of assailants broke into his home and shot him dead.
Over the next few days, Hernandez Sosa compiled the last stories published by the reporter in a frenzy. He drafted an innovative, special report analyzing Ruiz Vazquez’s work. Most of these stories contained direct criticism of Actopan’s local government, many mentioning the mayor by name. CEAPP offered the report and its findings to the prosecutor’s office.
Months later, a man was sentenced for the murder of Ruiz Vazquez. He was the mayor’s personal bodyguard’s father. An arrest warrant was issued for the mayor himself, as the alleged mastermind of the crime; he has been missing since 2019.
In the following years, it dawned on Hernandez Sosa that public officials could be involved in the killings of other journalists, too. In 2015, a local reporter was abducted from his home by a group of armed men while a couple of police officers watched. He went missing for 22 days until his body was finally found. Days prior, he had been threatened by the mayor, who was eventually issued an arrest warrant for ordering the murder. In another case, a local congressman, a former mayor and a municipal councillor were issued arrest warrants for allegedly ordering the murder of another local journalist in 2020. Two more municipal councillors were arrested for ordering the murder of yet another local reporter, killed in 2021.
Most of these public officials with arrest warrants have eluded their arrests.
While it is well known that reporters in Mexico are at grave risk, it is commonly assumed that only investigative reporters digging up secrets related to drug-trafficking operations are in danger, targeted and killed by kingpins. It is less well known that reporters can be killed for complaining about poorly built roads or for exposing conflicts of interest in a local government office and that it is often mayors who have them killed. The difference might be nuanced but it is huge.
By December 2020, two years after becoming a risk analyst, Hernandez Sosa was appointed CEAPP’s new executive secretary. By mid-2022, he proposed to launch a novel initiative: the Freedom of Expression Strategic Program. Unlike previous programs, which focused heavily on training reporters, this one proposed identifying and deactivating attacks before they happened, which meant preventing them by focusing on the source. CEAPP aimed this new program at local public officials specifically.
The Freedom of Expression Strategic Program aims to educate public officials on the importance of press freedom. As Hernandez Sosa, who is 32, explained to me: “We have municipalities where mayors think of themselves as kings; without a problem, they can send police officers, thugs or even go themselves to kill reporters without batting an eye.”
To train public officials, CEAPP offers a course consisting of three units. Firstly, CEAPP personnel explain why it’s important to have a free press in a democracy. Secondly, mayors are reminded they can sue reporters if they see fit. They also remind public officials that, if unhappy with a specific story, they can ask for the right of reply — a common law in Europe and Latin America, recently adopted in states like California and New York, allows readers to request a public response to damaging statements. Lastly, they remind mayors that it is their responsibility to make sure reporters are out of harm’s way and that, if something were to happen to a reporter, public officials would become the prime suspects in criminal cases that could make it as far as the federal prosecutor’s office.
Despite its innovative spirit, Hernandez Sosa’s Freedom of Expression Strategic Program has faced several challenges. On the one hand, reaching all mayors in Veracruz is no easy feat. Divided into 212 municipalities, the state has the third-most political divisions of any in Mexico — each with its own mayor — surpassed only by Oaxaca and Puebla. (The closest equivalent in the U.S. would be Texas, although it is larger in size, with 254 counties.)
Another challenge is that the Freedom of Expression Strategic Program has not been popular with everyone, especially public officials. Some mayors have considered CEAPP’s message as a threat, specifically when they’re reminded of the legal consequences they can face for intimidating or hurting a reporter. Regarding CEAPP’s recommendation to sue if deemed necessary, some freedom of expression groups worry about SLAPPs, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, a growing trend initially used by private actors to sue reporters that has increasingly been adopted by governments. “If you ask me what I prefer,” Hernandez Sosa told me, “judicial harassment or a reporter being harmed because a mayor took lethal actions against him? I prefer — a thousand times over — that this is settled in court.”
When the program was first launched, CEAPP was well known in 65 of Vereacruz’s 212 municipalities, where most reporters live. For the first two years of the program, the commission aspired to teach the course in 35 of them. But, as Hernandez Sosa would soon find out, not every mayor was eager to be taught the importance of freedom of expression. For example, a mayor from a municipality in the southern part of the state has flatly forbidden reporters from entering the town hall. Despite Hernandez Sosa’s repeated attempts to meet with him, the mayor remains steadfast in his policy of opacity.
In some other cases, though, Hernandez Sosa has earned people’s trust by having been on both sides, as a reporter and as a public official. He has become a mediator of sorts between both groups. One time, a municipality’s press person called him directly with information about the mayor, who had publicly said a certain reporter had limited time to live. “I sent an official letter requesting a meeting with the mayor without explaining why,” recalled Hernandez Sosa. “I was on my way there anyway so I just showed up, and he welcomed me for a meeting.” After the seven-hour drive from Xalapa, both men started talking. He showed me a photo of the small, stern-looking man wearing a big hat, sitting inside a small, beige office. “And the mayor himself began talking about the reporter, about how if her body showed up one day, everyone would blame him,” he said. Hernandez Sosa told the mayor that was exactly right: He would be the prime suspect if anything happened to the reporter, so he better make sure she stayed safe. Then, he mediated a meeting with both of them.
In a state riddled with organized crime and associated violence, there are more complicated cases. A reporter who covered the murders of environmental defenders began receiving threats from an organized crime group that, Hernandez Sosa suspects, works for the mayor. He has traveled to the region to meet with members of the criminal group. CEAPP is constantly monitoring the reporter, who has been issued a protection protocol. But a frank sit-down with that mayor is out of the question.
Two years after the Freedom of Expression Strategic Program’s launch, CEAPP has taught 22 courses and Hernandez Sosa has met with 39 mayors.
By the end of the year, Hernandez Sosa can seek reelection to continue leading CEAPP and working on the program. As for the program’s efficacy, Hernandez Sosa thinks it’s been successful so far. Not a single reporter has been killed in Veracruz since it started. And the government of the neighboring state of Oaxaca has shown interest in replicating the program.
“There’s definitely no other way than to exhaust the possibilities of dialogue and build political will from scratch, because it’s easy to say ‘the constitution already foresees this,’” said Hernandez Sosa. “But if you don’t go to these places, to the field, that policy will hardly ever be realized.”
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