Silencing the Messenger: Global Threats to Press Freedom

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The news is our connection to the world. Whether you wake up and listen to a podcast or grab a morning paper, journalists are responsible for the information you use to form an accurate picture of the world. 

It’s an easy thing to take for granted. But as authoritarian populism surges worldwide, journalism has become an increasingly dangerous profession - and populations are losing their access to the news they need. Nowhere is this trend more dramatic than in Latin America, especially in our closest neighbor Mexico, which has become one of the most dangerous places on Earth for reporting the news. 

I’m Gabrielle Sierra, and this is Why It Matters. Today, vanishing press freedom in Latin America, and the global assault on the news. 

Gabrielle SIERRA: What do you think is a healthy relationship between the government and journalism? Because it feels like there's this natural antagonism there, but when does it get unhealthy?

Carin ZISSIS: It gets unhealthy when we start to see people in high levels of government attack journalists verbally. Because if people at very high levels of government start criticizing the press, calling into question journalists and journalism, what we find is that then that trickles down to other levels of government and it becomes the norm.

This is Carin Zissis, editor-in-chief of AS/COA Online, the website of the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. She is also a veteran reporter on Mexican and Latin American affairs. 

ZISSIS: It starts to become the norm to doubt, question, criticize, attack journalists, and then that leads to actual violence against journalists. Then that becomes part of authoritarian control, because you're preventing a questioning of what the government is doing. It's really a starting point for democratic decay.

Jan-Albert HOOTSEN: I do believe that both in Mexico and beyond on a global level journalism is becoming more dangerous. 

This is Jan-Albert Hootsen, a veteran reporter who is also the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. This means he monitors press freedom in the region and helps reporters at risk.

HOOTSEN: There is a tendency globally to increasingly target anybody who might be involved in making information publicly available that will touch on the interests of very powerful players. They might be state. They might be non-state. But in general, the journalists and human rights defenders are becoming more legitimate targets. We're also dealing with the reality of changing technologies and increased surveillance, often illegal, of reporters. And I think that also makes it more dangerous, both for journalists and for sources. I think what we're seeing is the very logical, if not unfortunate, consequence of a media landscape that has been changing at a very staggering rate. Over the past, say, twenty to thirty years with the arrival of the internet, with the arrival of social media, with the arrival of a new kind of populism amongst politicians that largely derives much of its appeal from these new ways of communication. And it has exposed journalism to a new kind of scrutiny that didn't exist before.

In the case of Latin America, some of this scrutiny has been put into writing. A spate of recent laws have been aimed at silencing reporters. In 2021, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega approved a law forcing media outlets to register as “foreign agents,” giving the government near-total oversight of their spending and political activities. That same year, a sweeping bill was passed in Ecuador that criminalized the act of publishing digital content about a person without their consent. Changes like these target some of the basic tools that journalists need in order to do their job. 

HOOTSEN: Mexico has always been an extremely difficult country for the press. The country was ruled for approximately 70 years as a one-party state. So for the press during those 70 years in the twentieth century, when the modern press as we know it was largely shaped and created, the press in Mexico had to make a choice: either they became part of that political complex, meaning that they would become basically a mouthpiece of the party in power, or they would become independent and by being free media they would be exposed to all kinds of threats and pressures. As Mexico became a democracy or at least a partial democracy in 2000. There was an explosion in independent journalism and independent media which was unfortunately soon caught up by two realities. One of them being the economic reality. Mexico is a country where it is extremely difficult for a news outlet to survive because if you're independent, you're not going to get a lot of government advertisement. The other aspect which makes journalism increasingly difficult is the extreme violence against reporters which started rising in the 1990s and really exploded when Mexico informally launched the “war on drugs” which is very notorious on an international level right now. 

By the numbers, Latin America is consistently ranked as one of the deadliest regions in the world for reporters, with 30 journalists killed just last year. And within Latin America, Mexico is the most dangerous country of all. In 2021, 664 attacks were documented against the press there. And in 2022, nearly 40 percent of journalists killed in Latin America died in Mexico. Their deaths have been attributed to a mix of gang violence, political corruption, and a lack of arrests and prosecution for dangerous criminals. Only Ukraine - a country in the middle of a desperate war - saw more journalist deaths than Mexico in 2022.

https://youtu.be/0djgrGA8RDA?t=23 

Al Jazeera English: Over the past few decades the country’s violence and corruption has meant journalists face attacks from everywhere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGkoP4oQEwA 

CBS News: 2022 has been one of the deadliest years ever for journalists in Mexico.

https://youtu.be/MX-CGuzM2FM?t=21 

Al Jazeera: Intimidation, imprisonment, harassment, and assassinations. 

ZISSIS: In spite of being a democracy, in spite of being a country that's not currently at war, it is the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. If we really look at the numbers, this increase in violence against journalists began with the start of Mexico's offensive on cartels. Since that point, more than 125 journalists have died. There was a very important election in 2018 in which Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador won the presidency, and he came in with this huge mandate. He won by a landslide and he's sustained popularity over time. And at the same time it's coincided with a questioning of democratic institutions. So the press being a key example of that. But we also have an issue of what's happening in addition around, for example, the electoral agency in Mexico. The current government is trying to find ways to decrease its funding and to weaken some aspects of the INE, the electoral agency here. Just like the United States, Mexico's going to have another presidential election in 2024. 

In 2022, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador aka AMLO, threatened members of the Supreme Court, reduced checks and balances, and tightened his grip on political power. That same year, violence against journalists hit an all time high. 

According to the Economist’s Democracy Index report, Mexico is now considered a ‘hybrid regime,’ walking the line between a flawed democracy and a full-fledged authoritarian state. And after the past four and a half years of extreme press censorship and backsliding, the outlook for Mexican journalists is growing more and more grim. 

ZISSIS: Now the problem keeps getting worse. 2022 was the deadliest year on record. And we've seen this rise in violence against journalists since the start of the Lopez Obrador administration. It's been over time. It's to such a degree that the president starts every day with a press conference that goes on for a couple of hours. It allows him to set the agenda for what people are going to talk about in the country. And there is a segment in his, what we call the mañanera, the daily press conference, called “Quién es Quién en las Mentiras,” it's the who's who in the lying, who's who of the liars. And during the segment in his press conference, they actually put on a big screen pictures of columnists, journalists, critics of the government and try to discredit their comments and their reporting or their coverage or their columns, talking about things that are going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lcmf3Dm2X8Y 

El Universal: “Quién es quién en las mentiras de la semana,” así se va a llamar. “Quién es quién en las mentiras de la semana.”

ZISSIS: It's almost like a kind of blacklisting. What then happens is these same journalists then start to receive attacks. They start to receive attacks online. Really frightening attacks. Sometimes they get followed. There have been all kinds of stories. So, it's really quite scary. In December there was an attack on a very high profile journalist in Mexico named Ciro Gómez Leyva. When it happens to someone who is so well known, such a prominent journalist. It really sent a message to journalists across the country, this is what can happen to you. And he was someone who had been under attack by the AMLO government. And in fact after the attack, AMLO suggested that maybe the attack was carried out just to make the government look bad, as though it were a fake attack. So, it creates these narratives of what's true and what's false. Let's blur the lines, let's make it confusing. So, it really can create this atmosphere where this type of violence occurs.

Populists and authoritarian leaders are natural enemies of the press. And in order to consolidate power, most of these leaders feel they have to crack down on journalists. It’s something that is playing out all over the world. 

For example, since his term began in 2010, Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, has effectively dismantled press freedom. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has also shaped the news to his advantage - his country has one of the poorest ratings for press freedom as well as some of the highest numbers of incarcerated journalists in the world. And in the Philippines, former President Rodrigo Duterte threatened journalists during his rule by saying they’re ‘not exempt from assassination.’

The playbook goes all the way back to the fascist leaders of the 20th century, and even earlier. Lopez Obrador, for all his individual quirks, is part of a long and dark tradition. 

ZISSIS: I think a really important reason that we have to pay attention to what's happening in Mexico is because it serves as a warning. It serves as a warning in terms of what happens if there are attacks on the press. Certainly Mexico is a younger democracy. It has weaker institutions, and it shows really what happens when you do weaken those institutions, when you do have an erosion of institutions. And when we see the violence in a country just across the border having record numbers of journalists getting killed at a time of criticism of the press, at this time of eroding protections for the press, it's something that we can't just ignore. It's a warning of what will happen if we do. And freedom of the press is a key part of democracy.

SIERRA: So, you say it’s a warning - are you seeing similar dynamics unfold here in the U.S.?

ZISSIS: I think something that we've seen in recent years in the United States is a questioning of the press. We hear language around “the mainstream media does this” or “only covers that.” And we've seen high level government officials, including even, obviously, President Trump, be very vocal in attacking the press and coming after journalists. And really kind of vilifying the press in a new way. Some of the language that we have heard is really reminiscent of the type of threats you hear against the press in other countries.

SIERRA: Okay, so we are seeing some international themes here, but zooming back in on Mexico, is there anything unique that we’re seeing there? Are these dynamics different than what you’re seeing in the rest of Latin America? 

ZISSIS: Mexico has some of the same challenges we see in other parts of Latin America in that, because there has been this history, particularly when Mexico wasn't really a democracy, of journalists sometimes getting paid off, and a system in which journalists were in a way part of that system of maintaining this semi authoritarian situation. We have similarities in other parts of Latin America, but the problem with the fact that that was in the past is that the current government now tries to recall that memory. There's actually a word for it in Mexico, you're called a “chayotero,” that's a journalist who is thought to be bought off by officials or bought off in some way, bribed in some way in terms of its coverage. I think what we're seeing is a general increase in attacks in Latin America and murders. And unfortunately that means this model that we've seen in Mexico of attacks on the press, verbal attacks on press, it's something that can carry over into other countries and that has carried over into other countries.

HOOTSEN: Everything that is happening in Mexico nowadays, whether it's economical, whether it's to do with drug violence or whether it's to do with politics is in one way or another connected to the outside world. So press freedom is the same thing. Press freedom in a single country never just exists in a vacuum. It's part of a regional or even a global development. You know, we've talked about populism. We've talked about the way politicians are dealing with politicians everywhere around the globe, they will be copying each other. I think a good example here in Latin America is Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, extremely popular, also extremely authoritarian president who is democratically elected but is now trying to erode the democracy in his country.

https://youtu.be/Kv8yaFE2Pxk?t=46 

CBS Evening News: The country with the highest murder rate in the world for young people under the age of 19.

https://youtu.be/-xmRaaVkvd8?t=55 

Vice News: The whole question of public safety in El Salvador hinges around who controls the territory. Is it the gangs or is it the state?

https://youtu.be/IqmF5ltYyLk?t=19 

France 24 English: The focus falls on El Salvador’s President... Nayib Bukele.

https://youtu.be/IqmF5ltYyLk?t=65 

France 24 English: He’s very controversial, very popular in his country, but also criticized for endangering democracy in El Salvador.

El Salvador is a small country of just 6.5 million people, and is not usually thought of as a top concern for U.S. policy makers. But in recent years, dire conditions there have led to a massive outflow of migrants, with nearly 2.5 million El Salvadorians now living in the United States. The country’s leader, Nayib Bukele, is one of the youngest heads of state in Latin America. And since taking office, he has leveraged his immense popularity to crack down on press freedom in the country. 

HOOTSEN: And he does so by copying elements from Donald Trump, from López Obrador, from other politicians and then turning it into his own little Salvadoran variety of it. So none of this ever exists in the void. And that's why it's really important for everybody to understand that what's happening in your country will be happening in other countries. Politicians, the public, media - we're all looking at each other. We’re all copying things from each other and that's why it's important to understand both the local context and the global context.

Neil BRANDVOLD: It's a very scary time right now in El Salvador. 

This is Neil Brandvold. He’s an American documentary filmmaker and a photojournalist based in El Salvador. His groundbreaking documentary Unforgivable explores the romantic relationship between two gang members in an El Salvador prison.

BRANDVOLD: Prior to the rise of Bukele, the fear for most of us was reporting on gangs and being killed by a gang member or working in gang controlled territory, but that's shifted. So now, instead of being afraid of the gangs, the fear is of repercussions from the government. He's dismantled the Supreme Court, put in his own judges. With Congress, he controls the whole Congress and is changing the Constitution. And now, we've been 10 months in a martial law situation here where if you report on the gangs and they interpret that as you’re being a mouthpiece to the gangs, according to whatever the government says that is, it's a 10 to 15 year prison sentence for a journalist. Nayib Bukele has humongous approval ratings. The public believes what he says. So the general population is really distrustful of us. It's a mix of distrust, but also of fear of repercussions from the government. So when we go out to report and do stories, our access is often limited because people are afraid to speak out against the government on TV. So if you want to have an idea of how bad things have gotten here in El Salvador, the journalists that have fled, the majority of them have fled to Mexico, which has historically been one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist. And will be reporting on El Salvador from Mexico because they’re afraid of repercussions from the government.

Bukele enjoys enormous popularity, and tries to strike the image of a young, hip leader - wearing leather jackets and baseball caps, and wielding a savvy command of social media. In fact, Bukele enjoys 4 million Instagram followers, and 5 million twitter followers, and his habit of attacking critics online has earned him the moniker “the millennial dictator.” 

BRANDVOLD: He doesn't allow access to journalists to interview him. The only interviews he's given since he has taken power has been with Tucker Carlson at Fox News. Part of it's restricting access. Then also, demonizing the media on social media. He's very aggressive through Twitter, where he's just constantly attacking journalists to the point of calling journalists "gang members" and harassing them and scaring them out of the country. But that's where people are getting their news. One thing that's interesting here in El Salvador, for instance, is the majority of people rely on news that comes from government-run media because those are the only media that's reaching rural communities or people that don't have access. So, the only thing they're hearing is what the government is telling them that they should be believing, and then constantly demonizing the opposition or anyone that speaks out or says anything different than the party line.

But aside from Bukele’s influencer status, he has also achieved a feat many thought impossible. In March of 2022, Bukele officially declared a “war on gangs” and since then murders in El Salvador have dropped 56 percent. The change reinforced his popularity enormously.

Critics, however, note that in the process, El Salvador attained the highest incarceration rate in the world, with about 2 percent of its adult population living behind bars. Human rights groups have raised concerns about wrongful arrests and abusive conditions in prison facilities, but these criticisms have done nothing to jeopardize Bukele’s popularity.

BRANDVOLD: It's really interesting. I think a lot of people internationally would never grasp how bad the situation under gangs were in El Salvador. It was incredibly violent. The highest homicide rate in the entire world outside of Syria for years. They were just incredibly violent. The people that live there just suffered horribly. I covered the crime scene in homicide beat for years, going out at night and we would be bouncing from murder, to murder, to murder. Horrible, horrible murders. And the general public, when he came in and he said, "I'm going to dismantle the gangs. I don't care about human rights. Throw everyone in the prison." In the last 10 months, he's arrested 60,000 people. 60,000 people that have no access to a lawyer, to see a judge, or any habeas corpus. And the general population I think was so fed up with living under the fist of these really violent, horrible gang members that would extort them, would murder them, would kidnap their kids, that they're just like, "Let him do what he is doing." And you speak to people and they're like, "He's dismantled the gangs," which is largely true. For the most part, the gangs are not operating like they used to. So I think your average person says, "Keep going, Bukele." He's illegally, unconstitutionally running for a reelection, he's announced, and will probably win by a very large majority. And it's been kind of this handoff of security and democracy. When you look at democracy in El Salvador, it’s this very short-lived democracy. The Civil War ended in the '90s. We're talking like 30 years of democracy - that's been a lot of failed governments. Each party has been super corrupt. And they're just looking at this, "We want security." So they just shut us off or attack us in the streets. It's made it very difficult to feel like you're making a change because the average person in El Salvador just doesn't want to hear it.

SIERRA: Can you tell me a little bit more about how Bukele has made it hard for you and for other journalists to report the news?

BRANDVOLD: Access used to be very open prior to Bukele. I mean, we were spending months in the prisons. I had access to the forensics teams, which is really important here to be able to get really good numbers on homicides and anything like that. Before Bukele was president I interviewed him in his campaign many times and it was very open. As journalists, we all knew that things were going to change when he came to power. And they changed really quickly. It went from pretty much open access where you could go with a forensics team, or ride along with the police, or go into the jails, to absolutely no information, no access. And then, it spiraled into we found that journalists' phones were all hacked. We were getting Pegasus. Over 30 journalists here were infected with Pegasus. And that's just a small amount of the spyware they've been using against journalists.

https://youtu.be/b6VxWBXuEGM?t=84  

Al Jazeera English: Pegasus has been used by governments around the world to spy on dissidents and journalists via their mobile phones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc-rWN-k4Xo 

60 Minutes: We look specifically at a controversial Israeli called the NSO Group that says it developed a hacking tool that can break into just about any smartphone on Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3tydkL9hgU&t=46s 

Al Jazeera English: What’s particularly concerning about this spyware is, unlike most infections where you have to click on something or do something, it just gets into your phone.

Journalists have always worried about being spied on, but the threat of invasive spyware is unique to the current generation. Long story short, once a phone has been compromised by Pegasus, everything on it can be viewed, including calls, texts, location, and recorded materials. It’s a perfect tool for would-be authoritarians.

BRANDVOLD: So, we know that El Salvador purchased it from this Israeli company, Pegasus. They have access to basically everything on your phone. So they know where you're going, and they can access it. They have access to all of your photos, your contacts, your microphone, your camera, everything. They have full access.

SIERRA: That's pretty scary. Yeah.

BRANDVOLD: Yeah. Very scary. But speaking with contacts in the US State Department, we know that that's just a small portion of the amount of spyware and hacking abilities that the government is capable of. I mean, the amount of security measures that we have to take as journalists in El Salvador, has just - it's skyrocketed. Using different apps to scan our phones to see if it's infected. But then also knowing most likely the government has access to everything on our phone and just communicating in a way with the idea that the government's listening. 

HOOTSEN: Another thing that's very important to point out here is that Pegasus is only one kind of spyware. It's only one of dozens that we know are being used by governments across the globe. We're not nearly done investigating Pegasus, and, in the meantime, how many other kinds of spyware that are much harder to detect may have already been bought by the Mexican government and by other governments in Latin America? 

As technology evolves, the risk for journalists gets even greater. Hostile rhetoric circulating online can easily translate into very real violence amongst the public. And as some leaders in Latin America further limit access to independent information, citizens are being led astray by propaganda that dictates how they should view the press. 

This is certainly the case in Mexico and El Salvador, and echoes of the problem can be heard from Eastern Europe to South Asia, and even in the United States. A strong free press is, after all, a hard thing to build, and an easy thing to lose, and it is an eternal thorn in the side of those who would establish a monopoly on power. Even now, despite these global setbacks, journalists are still reporting, finding new ways to circumvent obstacles, and hoping that soon they may be able to do their jobs without a target on their backs.

ZISSIS: I have to say that it's incredibly inspiring to think about journalists who want to report in spite of all of these threats, especially because if we're going to go on a local level, we know that they're not going to be paid well. They could be risking their lives, they could be risking threats and violence against their family members. We've seen cases where journalists have been attacked or killed in front of family members. It's really frightening. How do you create the conditions for people to want to become journalists? And the problem is, this is exactly what weakens the democracy in the country because people don't want to. Why would you do that? Why would you put yourself in harm's way? It makes it all the more inspiring for those who continue to try to report and try to report independently. But it certainly creates the conditions for, in many parts of the country, where journalists face these kinds of threats from local authorities, from local police, from local crime groups, because the threats come from all different sides that we have a lack of information, we have a lack of information about what's going on. And so it's a real reminder of they're holding a government accountable that might not be able to be held accountable in any other way.

HOOTSEN: I'm actually an optimist in that sense. If I weren't an optimist I wouldn't be able to do our job. I think fatalism is fatal in advocating for press freedom. People still want a critical press and every really good journalistic investigation immediately gets a huge bump, it gets a huge response both on social media and beyond. And that shows me that ultimately people will miss it when it's gone. There is a hunger for press freedom. There's a hunger for good journalism and there is good sense amongst the general public that press freedom is something that needs to be protected. And that there are still a lot of spaces that are worth defending and that will continue to be defended.

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Why It Matters is a production of the Council on Foreign Relations. The opinions expressed on the show are solely that of the guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. 

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For Why It Matters, this is Gabrielle Sierra signing off. See you around!