“The worst mistake Mexico has made was launching the military into the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime”he said in an interview with Cooperative the journalist Monica Gonzalez on the occasion of International Press Freedom Day.
With more than four decades dedicated to rigorous journalistic investigations, work that he also carried out during the darkest days of Chile devastated by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), he expressed his feelings “pity” and “concern” about the debate on security, in the current context of crime.
“I have been a teacher of investigative journalism for journalists from all over Latin America for 15 years. I have seen on the front lines how my wonderful colleagues from Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, also from Ecuador and the Peruvians They have reported, investigated and denounced organized crime and have taken all the risks. We have seen how this scourge, which is a true plague, advances uncontrollably towards the south due to corruption, because it is co-opting the institutions. And the worst mistake that Mexico has made was launching the military into the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime,” said González, winner of the 2019 National Journalism Award, to What’s left of the day.
“From 2006 until now,” he warned, “the official number of missing people since the war on drugs was launched is 119,000, plus the 300,000 violent deaths in eight years between the governments of Peña Nieto and Andrés López Obrador, which unfortunately It’s going to end with an incredible record. Why is this? When you take (the military) to the drug cartels, they shoot money and distribute money like crazy among the authorities – mayors, judges and police -, two more cartels were created with people who left the Armed Forces and the police. and they formed Los Zetas, for example.”
“To gain ground and appropriate land, (Los Zetas) were much more ferocious, more ruthless, much more brutally violent, tearing up bodies, burying them alive, exploiting migrant women and men on haciendas for export crops. That is reported, it is seen , there are records, it is not an invention. This happened throughout Central America and continued to descend towards the south. This is happening in Ecuador, in the Amazon of Peru,” he emphasized.
THREATS OF ORGANIZED CRIME TO PRESS FREEDOM
Founder of the Center for Journalistic Investigation of Chile (Ciper) in 2007, González stated to Cooperative that in Chile, “in comparison with other countries in America – and I say America, I am not saying this time Latin America, Central America, South America, (but) all of America -, We still have a situation that does not have aggravating factors” that threaten freedom of the press.
“Still, I say, because “We have very, very serious glimpses.”he warned.
In the journalist’s opinion, “the most important thing for us is to take off the blindfold, to look squarely at the enormous responsibility we have to be oxygen and water for the citizens, to inform them of the background of this organized crime that has just occurred. give a terrible blow, which continues giving blows, because “sometimes it is disguised as demands, other times it is disguised as street commerce.”
In that sense, he made reference to the investigation into the shooting death of the reporter Francisca Sandoval on May 1, 2022: “We cannot continue saying that a traveling merchant murdered her (…) Do street vendors have guns and fire more than 20 projectiles in a May Day activity? I saw it, they didn’t tell me. Why were there police officers who provided protection to those who shot at the protesters that day from Meiggs Street? Why hasn’t there been an internal summary for those police officers?”he reflected.
