Day of the Dead, Mexico, Danger for Journalists

DAY OF THE DEAD 2011

by Homero Aridjis

In ancient Mexico it was believed that people who drowned went to the heaven of Tláloc, the rain god, that soldiers who fell in combat became part of the Eastern sun, that the souls of women who had just given birth met the sun at its zenith and dwelled with earthly goddesses in the east, and that the north was governed by Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecacihuatl, the Lord and Lady of death. In this funereal geography, these points in space were the destinations of the dead, the same points to which the plumed serpent, the god Quetzalcóatl blew. But death was not just myth and rite for the ancient Mexicans, it was everyday life and it had a physical body, it adorned temples and tombs, it had names and material forms and uses, it was vessels or clothing, it was clay or stone, it smelled of fire and copal, of water and blood.

Time itself had a tomb of years. On the day a Sun was born, a date was set for its death. In the subsequent invasions Mexico suffered in the 16th century, the discoverers, the conquistadors, the missionaries, and the settlers brought their own kind of death, the European notion of dying.

Indeed they brought two deaths: one physical, the product of arms and diseases – smallpox, measles and typhus – and the other spiritual, the one which follows death in the hereafter and leads the sinner to hell. The latter was preached and declared by the Franciscans, Dominicans and Augustinians, who had inherited the medieval fear of death. Then in their spiritual conquest, which followed the temporary conquest by Hernán Cortés, the friars spread through the streets of New Spain images of the triumphant skeletons of the Dance of Death. The Aztecs, who made these foreign gods their own, including their manner of death, must have felt at home when the missionaries brought with them the worship of the relics of the saints – of their physical remains – to them, who lived with the bones and skulls of the sacrificed. We are the children of these two deaths, the Mexican and the European: the death of the Aztec lapidaries and the engravers Holbein and Durero, the death of the macabre artists of the tzompantli (the palisade where the Aztecs displayed the heads of the sacrificed) and the death of the sculptors of the arches and canopies of Romanesque churches, the death of ritual sacrifice and memento mori. In the Leyenda Dorada [Golden Legend], Jacopo de Voragine wrote that we, mortal men, in honouring the dead, are honouring ourselves in our future state of misery or glory.

Nowadays Mexico has become a huge cemetery for victims of major crimes. When it comes to violence our country is one of the most dangerous in the world for journalists. Not only for those who produce reports and write articles, but also for those who take photos, draws cartoons, or are witnesses to any bloody event, act of political corruption, or police injustice, and even those who have the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For me, living in Mexico and reading both the national press and publications from remote villages and state capitals, reports of attacks are almost daily, and there are so many that there is hardly time to digest one before we hear about another. What is unsettling about these attacks, apart from the condition in which the victims are found, is that these attacks and killings are rarely investigated, and we almost never hear about the outcome of an inquiry or the arrest of the real perpetrator of a crime against a man or woman who risked their life, and the safety of their family, to do a journalist’s job often for a meagre fee, or out of a professional responsibility to inform society and the world of the violence which is lashing the country these days.

But at this time, journalists are not only pursued by organised crime in all its forms, but also by local, state and federal governments, by police forces, the military, and even by people whose job is to impart justice. On these grounds the federal government not only has to guarantee the safety of journalists, but also resolve the cases pending and punish the criminals, regardless of whether they are within the government or not, because as time goes on the majority get caught up in a fog which has so many lines of investigation that the real one is (deliberately) lost.

A journalist friend was telling me about a notorious political crime, where the authorities present a new line of inquiry every once in a while which takes the investigation further away from reality, until it reaches the point where nobody knows anything, like playing a game of “follow the marble”, concealing the truth. For example, with regard to the two women who were killed in Mexico City on 1 September this year1, because they were journalists investigating a property company, people started to talk about suspicious causes for their deaths, until the media practically stopped giving out information about what had happened, when the investigation was suspended they ended up linking the victims to criminals. The intention was to muddy the waters, and cast doubt on their professional integrity. Then came obscurity.

Another common practice in the media, in conspiracy with the authorities, is to trivialise a case so that people stop taking it seriously. This not only happens with journalists, but also with defenders of human rights who are victims of attacks.

This Day of the Dead, we passionately hope that Mexico does not continue to be a sacrificial altar for journalists and those fighting in defence of human rights and freedom of expression.

Which heaven will the journalists killed in Mexico go to?

Mexico City, 2 November 2011

*Homero Aridjis is a writer, journalist and Vice President of PEN International.