Silencing the Press in Criminal Wars: Why the War on Drugs Turned Mexico into the World’s Most Dangerous Country for Journalists

This article examines the effects of the militarization of public security and the conflicts it triggers on a central democratic institution: press freedom. We focus on Mexico, which experienced multiple waves of assassinations of local journalists after the federal government declared a War on Drugs against the country’s main cartels and deployed the military to the country’s most conflictive regions. We argue that violence against journalists is tied to the outbreak of criminal wars—the multiple localized turf wars and power struggles unleashed by the federal military intervention. Subnational politicians and their security forces and drug lords are at the center of these conflicts because they jointly enable local operations of the transnational drug-trafficking industry. To defend their interests, they have individual and shared incentives to prevent city- and town-level journalists from (or punish them for) publishing fine-grained information that may compromise their criminal and political survival and their quest for local control. We compiled the most comprehensive dataset available on lethal attacks on journalists from 1994 to 2019 to test our claims. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that violence against local journalists substantially increased in militarized regions, where the military decapitated the cartels and fragmented the criminal underworld, triggering violent competition for criminal governance—de facto rule over territories, people, and illicit economies. Evidence from original focus groups and interviews with at-risk reporters suggests that governors, mayors, and their police forces possibly joined cartels in murdering journalists to mitigate the risks of unwanted information and to minimize the costs of criminal governance by silencing the press and society. Our study offers a sobering lesson of how the militarization of anti-crime policy and the onset of criminal wars can undermine local journalism, press freedom, and democracy.