In at least a dozen countries worldwide, the sword is proving mightier than the pen

'We work under siege': the journalists who risk death for doing their jobs

Fewer journalists have been killed this year than in the recent past. The global death toll in 2017 stands at 54, down on the 79 killed last year and on course to be the least bloody year for a decade.

Of those 54, at least 34 killings have been confirmed as having a “journalistic motivation”. But the numbers tell only half the story.

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Intimidation, non-lethal violence, threats and prosecution are as rampant as ever, from Mexico and Brazil in the Americas to swaths of the former Soviet Union and supposedly freer jurisdictions such as India and Bangladesh.

Two killings in Europe this year underlined that violence towards journalists can happen even in relatively affluent societies. But according to data from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are the deadliest countries in which to be a journalist.

In a week in which the veracity of high profile tweets has once again been called into question, the conclusion is dire: you can propagate lies on social media with utter impunity, but if you seek to tell the truth you can be killed.

Mexico

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pictures of Javier Valdez, a journalist murdered in May, at a protest in Mexico City calling for his killers to face justice. Photograph: Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images

Mexico has the dubious title of the most dangerous place in the western hemisphere in which to publish, with an estimated 100 journalists murdered since 2000.



This year offered little respite. In May, Javier Valdez was pulled from this car and shot dead in the street as he left the office of the crusading news weekly Ríodoce, which he had founded to cover crime and corruption in the cartel-infested city of Culiacán.

Miroslava Breach, reporter with the newspapers La Jornada and Norte, was murdered two months earlier in a hail of gunfire as she drove her child to school in the northern city of Chihuahua. A note left at the scene and signed by a drug cartel thug caustically read: “For being a snitch. You’re next, governor.” Norte subsequently ceased operations, citing journalists’ safety.



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Patricia Mayorga, Chihuahua correspondent for the news weekly Proceso, covered the same issues as Breach: human rights and drug cartels. She received the same threats as Breach, forcing her to flee the country.



“We work under siege from all sides: from the cartels to the government,” Mayorga said in November after receiving the international press freedom award from the CPJ. “We work among those who try to control and destroy journalism.”



None of the murder cases have been solved – a troubling trend in Mexico, where journalists and press freedom organisations say the rampant impunity only encourages more attacks.



The Mexican president, Enrique Peña Nieto, has publicly stated complete support for press freedom. That pledge has rung hollow, however, as the number of murders has increased every year since he took office in 2012.



Even more dismaying is the ineffectiveness of the agency created to protect journalists coming under threat, while a special prosecutor’s office for pursuing such crimes has failed to resolve 97% of the cases it has received.



“Where organised crime has a strong presence, where they are linked to local law enforcement … you can clearly see the local authorities don’t investigate those crimes as they should,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, a CPJ representative in Mexico.

Brazil

Brazilian journalists have long worked in one of the world’s most dangerous reporting environments, but now they are also increasingly under pressure from lawsuits and internet trolls.

At least 15 journalists have been killed over the past decade, and the assassins are almost never caught. As a result, Brazil is ranked as the eighth worst country on the CPJ’s global impunity index. Reporters are particularly at risk if they cover corruption and crime in small towns and cities, where policing is minimal.

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In terms of violence, the past year has been better than most, with one murder. Luís Gustavo, a blogger, was shot a dozen times in the head after he posted a report about drug dealers in his town of Aquiraz in June.

But in the current febrile political atmosphere, harassment is also a growing problem for journalists. Online intimidation is becoming more common and there are also physical and legal threats from the police and other authorities, particularly during demonstrations.

Andre Lucas de Almeida, a photographer from São Paulo, was arrested and accused of starting a fire when he covered a protest by the Free Pass Movement in April. It was not the first time.

“I’ve been arrested, assaulted several times, and a subway guard broke my equipment while I was working,” he said. “In every case, the perpetrators went unpunished.”



India

Those who report in remote regions or vernacular languages – and are therefore less visible – are most at risk. At least three journalists have been murdered this year, including Gauri Lankesh, an editor and fierce critic of Hindu extremists, who was gunned down on her doorstep in Bengaluru in September. Suddip Datta Bhaumik, a crime reporter, was shot dead last week on a paramilitary base in Tripura state, where he was investigating allegations of corruption.

Sandhya Ravishankar

Men started taking photographs outside the home of Sandhya Ravishankar, a Tamil-Nadu-based investigative journalist, after she published a series of reports exposing illegal sand mining in the state. “My number has been made public on social media and I have received abusive calls threatening to rape me and sprinkle chilli powder on my private parts,” Ravishankar said. “Police complaints have led nowhere. No arrests have been made and no efforts have been made by the police to even investigate this case.”



Turkey

In Turkey, the threat is more juridical than existential, though around 10 journalists have been killed over the past decade. Since last year’s coup attempt, almost 200 media organisations have been shut, including newspapers, websites, TV stations and news agencies, and 2,500 journalists have been laid off. As of April, 152 journalists were in prison, the highest number anywhere in the world.

Russia

Russia continues to be a difficult and dangerous place for independent journalists, as the space for free media shrinks further and the few voices of dissent find themselves either under attack or forced to flee.

This year a number of journalists have preferred to leave the country rather than stay and face the risks. In September the columnist Yulia Latynina fled Russia after offline threats turned real: her car was set on fire and she was sprayed with faeces in the street. Elena Milashina, the Novaya Gazeta reporter who first broke the story about the purge of gay men in Chechnya, was forced to spend several months outside Russia for her safety.

Many of Russia’s liberal journalists blame their counterparts on state television for helping whip up hatred against them. In October a television news report alleged the liberal radio station Ekho Moskvy was taking money from foreign NGOs to destabilise Russia, and claimed Ekho posed as much of a threat to Russia as Islamic State. A month later, one of the journalists named in the report, Tatiana Felgenhauer, was stabbed in the neck by an assailant at Ekho’s studios.

Tatiana Felgenhauer. Photograph: Echo Moscow

It appears the attack was not political, but Ekho’s editor-in-chief, Alexei Venediktov, said the dangerous levels of violence in society had won tacit approval from authorities keen to harness conservative social sentiment.

Yevgenia Albats, editor of the liberal magazine the New Times, said: “It is a fact of life that you can get killed or harmed if you cover politics in my country – as it happened to two dozen reporters in the Moscow region alone in the last decade.

“Back in 2010 an explosive was found underneath my car’s fuel tank. I was lucky, it was found by a mechanic in the garage before somebody activated it. Operatives from the FSB anti-terrorist department came, extracted the container, and never got back to us. No criminal investigation was conducted either.”

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Journalists, especially those digging into corruption or abuses of power among the political elite, have long been threatened or killed in Russia. The CPJ estimates 58 have been killed with a confirmed motive since 1993. These range from high-profile names such as Anna Politkovskaya, gunned down outside her Moscow apartment in 2006, to regional reporters running afoul of local authorities.

Sometimes the people who carried out the attack are arrested and jailed, but it is almost unheard of for the people who ordered the attacks to be brought to justice. When the prominent liberal journalist Oleg Kashin was beaten to within an inch of his life in 2010, the then president, Dmitry Medvedev, visited him in hospital and promised that the case would be solved. However, seven years later, there has been no result.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Oleg Kashin. Photograph: Maxim Avdeyev/AP

The wife of one of the assailants said he had been commissioned by Andrei Turchak, a regional governor, but Turchak was never questioned. Last month he was named deputy chairman of Russia’s upper house of parliament.