Crime Reporting No Longer Illegal in Violent Mexican State of Sinaloa

After a popular backlash, the governor of Sinaloa said he would abolish a law making it a crime to write about crime in the notorious Mexican narco state

Author: Jan-Albert Hootsen

MEXICO CITY, MEXICO—Making it a crime to report on crime: It sounds like something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. But in Sinaloa, a state in northern Mexico known for being a drug lord’s paradise, it was also briefly the law.
The state’s Congress approved a bill last week prohibiting journalists from publishing stories or photos about crime and violence, save for what’s printed in official government press releases. The government’s rationale was that the law would somehow help the justice system provide people accused of crimes with fair trials. The Mexican public, however, didn’t buy it.
After a popular backlash, Governor Mario López Váldez said he would abolish the law today. Lawmakers, meanwhile, tried to convince the public that the whole thing was a big misunderstanding—that they had accidentally rubber-stamped the bill without reading it because they were really busy.

Scenes like this one from 2012, when authorities found the dismembered bodies of seven men in Culiacán, remain all too common in the state of Sinaloa.

REUTERS 

 

 

Analysts say the episode is the latest example of state governments in Mexico trying to prevent the press and others from reporting on news or expressing views they consider unfavorable. The city of Puebla, which is located just east of Mexico City, approved a bill in May that allows state troopers to use lethal force against aggressive crowds during demonstrations. That same month, the state Congress in Chiapas, the southernmost part of Mexico, approved a similar law that bans lethal force but permits just about anything else.
Critics say both laws leave way too much room for interpretation, giving police officers carte blanche to kill protesters. Governors Rafael Moreno Valle of Puebla and Manuel Velasco of Chiapas, on the other hand, defended the laws as attempts to protect policemen against mob violence. Yet the two lawmakers said they would retract the measures last month after police reportedly killed a 13-year old boy during clashes with protesters in the town of San Bernardino, just south of the state capital. The city government is still investigating the incident, but witnesses say the cops shot the teenager with rubber bullets, a method permitted by Puebla’s law.
Despite this success—and the apparent victory in Sinaloa—human rights observers in Mexico say the battle is far from over. They’re worried about the power of the state and federal governments, which they say have expanded in recent years.
“It is of course a good thing that public opinion has defeated these repressive laws,” says Victor Hugo López of the Chiapas-based Fray Bartolomé human rights center. “But in the end, what we see here is very problematic. State governments are trying to repress any kind of dissent. They may have been unsuccessful now, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try again in the future.