Mexico and U.S. have troubled relationship

Mexican state of Veracruz is most dangerous place for reporters in Western Hemisphere

People have been heaping scorn on U.S. President Donald Trump ever since he announced his intention to build a wall along the Mexican-American border. It has been seen as a manifestation of racism and xenophobia.

At his June 2015 announcement speech, Trump’s remarks about undocumented Mexicans being criminals and rapists sparked an intense furor.

His desire to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement is seen in the same vein. Trump holds NAFTA responsible for “waves” of illegal migrants from Mexico since the agreement was enacted in 1993.

Throughout American history, Mexico has been considered “the other.” As Laila Lalam, a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, has written, “In this kind of rhetoric, the border separates not just nationals from foreigners, rich from poor and north from south, but also order from chaos, civilization from barbarians, decent people from criminals.”

In his 2005 article “Placing ‘Touch of Evil’, ‘The Border,’ and ‘Traffic’ in the American Imagination,” published in the Journal of Popular Film & Television, Jack M. Beckham II analyzes three popular motion pictures, released in, respectively, 1958, 1982, and 2000.

They demonstrate, he suggests, that American-made cinema focusing on the border often functions as a cultural response to American policy changes that affect it and immigration. They don’t paint a pretty picture.

But let no one mistake Mexico for, say, New Zealand. It is indeed a violent country, and the border is particularly dangerous. In fact, much of the land border is already fenced off.

If anything, since the declaration of a drugs war by then President Felipe Calderon in 2006, things in Mexico have become worse. More than 150,000 Mexicans have died of related violence and this doesn’t even include the 26,000 disappeared, many ending up in unmarked mass graves.

The country had more killings in the first quarter of 2017 than in the start of any year in at least two decades. For January through March, there were 5,775 killings around the country, up 29 per cent from the same period in 2016.

Few atrocities receive much international attention, one exception being the widely publicized disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in the state of Guerrero in 2014. The mass murders still remain unsolved – as do 98 percent of all killings.

Ciudad Juarez, a slum-ridden border city across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, is dominated by drug cartels that murder with impunity. Last year set a record for homicides.

Further down river, Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, is a place where illegal immigration, drugs and weapons converge. Numerous stores have shut down ever since a turf war between cartels struck the city.

The same is true for Nuevo Laredo, south of Laredo. I’ve been to both of these Mexican border cities and one could feel the tension.

Mexico is a country where even journalism can be a deadly trade. In the 2016 book The Sorrows of Mexico, an anthology of reporting by seven of Mexico’s leading journalists, editor Lydia Cacho’s “Fragments from a Reporter’s Journal” recounts the twenty hours of torture she experienced in 2006 when exposing sex traffickers.

She is lucky to be alive. According to an April 29 New York Times article by Azan Ahmed, its Mexican bureau chief, at least 104 journalists have been murdered in the country since 2000, while 25 others have disappeared, and presumed dead.

The Mexican state of Veracruz is the most dangerous place to be a reporter in the entire Western Hemisphere.

Last year, 11 Mexican journalists were killed, the highest number this century. In March, a newspaper in Ciudad Juarez shut down after nearly 30 years after three journalists from other news organizations were killed. Even corrupt mayors and police officers have threatened journalists.

Ahmed knows his colleagues in the Mexican media often cannot reveal criminality. “It’s incumbent on us to do the kinds of stories that they can’t do,” he stated.