Mexico’s program to protect journalists struggles to work
MEXICO CITY — After years of threats and attacks that Candido Rios blamed on a local mayor furious over his reporting, Rios’ home in Mexico’s deadliest state for journalists was encircled by a fence topped with coils of barbed wire and surrounded by a half-dozen surveillance cameras he monitored on screens in the living room.
None of that mattered the afternoon that he stopped, just like every other day on his way home from work, at a highway gas station store that is also a community meeting place of sorts. As Rios was chatting with a local rancher, armed men abruptly pulled up and opened fire, killing them and a former police inspector who had just come over.
Rios, a hard-nosed crime reporter for Diario de Acayucan, had been in Mexico’s federal protection program for journalists since 2013, its first full year. On Aug. 22 at the gas station in the Veracruz state town of Covarrubias, he became the first reporter enrolled to be slain, sending a chilling message to anyone else relying on the program to stay safe.
Journalists and activists say the killing made it abundantly clear that the Mexico City-based program known as “the Mechanism” is incapable of protecting the nearly 600 enrollees working nationwide. The program has a staff of only about 30 and it has no security forces of its own.