The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora Institute organized an event titled “Silencing the Press in Criminal Wars: Why the War on Drugs Turned Mexico Into the World's Most Dangerous Country for Journalists” on Tuesday, Oct. 1. The event brought in Guillermo Trejo, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and the director of the Violence and Transitional Justice Lab at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Trejo is a researcher examining political and criminal violence, as well as an advocate for human rights and social justice in Mexico and Latin American.
The event opened with Trejo’s presentation, followed by a half-hour Q&A session. In an email to The News-Letter, Claire Trilling, a doctoral student in the political science department, discussed why she attended the event and her connection to Trejo’s presentation.
“I came to the event because of my respect for and interest in his academic work and also because his campus visit is a good networking opportunity for me as a grad student,” she wrote.
Trejo began with the statistic 25% of journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2019. He emphasized that, contrary to popular belief, city and town-level journalists are the primary victims of assassinations in Mexico, not national or state-level politicians.
“Mexico has become one of the world’s most lethal countries for journalists, human rights defenders [and] defenders of land, territories and natural resources,” Trejo noted.
He emphasized the importance of recognizing who the journalists were and analyzing their identities.
“It’s not the national or international human rights defenders [who are being killed], but local ones instead,” he clarified.
Trejo explained that subnational authoritarian elites – powerful political or economic leaders who maintain authoritarian control over specific regions or territories within a country – are conducting these assassinations to safeguard their tight grip over local power, while drug cartels also target journalists to limit information flow from drug markets.
Trejo emphasized the need for freedom of speech and publication in a democracy. Mexican authorities and organized crime groups are explicitly inhibiting transparency and accountability for Mexican citizens. In an interview with The News-Letter, political science SNF Agora predoctoral fellow Maya Jenkins revealed that she admires how the topic of democracy extended into the event’s presentation.
“As a part of my program I go to those seminars just to be a part of the learning community around democracy, since I am interested in democracy and theories of democracy,” she said.
Trejo’s presentation then transitioned into a discussion of informed citizenship and increased citizen safety. These core concepts enabled his argument to go beyond the borders of Mexico and Latin America. Trilling also reflected how Trejo’s ideas on these topics broadened her understanding of political violence.
“While I do not personally focus on organized crime in my research, I found his article to be a useful contribution to the way we think about political violence, state-criminal relations, and media freedom,” she wrote.
Trejo then highlighted that Mexico has been immersed in violence in the country’s fight against cartels for over 18 years. He explained how most of the international community does not recognize the “state-cartel” wars as legitimate “wars.” However, Trejo stated that he believed that it is important for many countries to identify them as such, as the state is actively deploying troops against over 450 organized criminal groups. In addition, there are an overwhelming amount of inner-cartel (turf) wars, in which cartels fight against one another.
Throughout the development of subnational criminal governance regimes, Trejo’s data accumulation revealed that there have been over 300,000 deaths and over 115,000 disappearances.
“If you take all south ensconced dictatorships of the 1960s, Mexico has more disappearances than all the others combined,” he commented.
Trejo pointed out that there are two main ideas that puzzle political scientists when examining the social discourse on violence. Firsty, most killings occur in subnational regions experiencing intense partisan competition, where party alternation is a common occurrence. The second is that cartels went to war to for control over drug markets 16 years before the onset of the major waves of assassinations.
To Trejo, these ideas are perplexing because, in regions with intense political competition, one would expect more accountability, but instead, there is a rise in violence against journalists. In addition, the fact that cartels fought for drug market control 16 years before the wave of killings makes it unclear why they started targeting journalists much later, suggesting the violence might be more about political power than just drug trade control.
“Until the state came in, there were no assassinations of journalists,” Trejo said.
He then emphasized that local journalists face lethal attacks for the work that they do, as they have access to multiple networks of local information. These journalists have intelligence that enables them to build cases and conduct further investigations regarding war dynamics, battles over illicit economics, state-criminal collusion, criminal governance and mass atrocities.
“Journalists that are getting killed report on an intersection of politics, corruption, crime and security,” Trejo concluded.
According to Trejo’s research, drug lords and their political allies are motivated to assassinate journalists to diminish transaction costs of de facto rule. Drug lords and their political allies use violence against journalists as a strategic tool to silence opposition, reduce the costs of maintaining power and operate outside the law – thereby undermining democracy.
Jenkins expressed her intrigue with Trejo’s work — she mentioned how his methods of representing his data, findings and research made his presentation captivating and easy to follow.
“How he teaches the information was really impressive,“ she said. “I think that his ability to make what is happening in Mexico and how that interlocks with journalists and the drug war was really precise and was really interesting.”
Many attendees expressed their admiration for Trejo’s passion and ambition to continue to fight for journalists in Mexico and to expose the institutions that enable such cruel brutality.
“I appreciate that Trejo connects his research to practical advising work aimed at improving protections for journalists there,” Trilling reflected.
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