Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador celebrated this Thursday – as one of the achievements of his Government (2018-2024) – that there have been no murders of journalists or political leaders “beyond what circumstances have caused”, despite the fact that the organization Article 19 has reported 47 homicides against the press during the six-year term.
Questioned during his press conference about the achievements of his government, which ends on September 30, the president said there are three things he is proud of: the fight against corruption, the reduction of poverty and the fact that there have been no murders of journalists or political leaders, according to his perspective.
“The third thing I celebrate, knock on wood because I’m 20 or 25 days away, is that we have not had murders of journalists beyond what the circumstances have caused, nor of politicians,” the president declared. This despite the fact that, in its most recent report, the organization Article 19 documented that, since December 2018, when the López Obrador Administration began, 47 journalists have been murdered in the country for their work, the same number as in the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018).
The Mexican leader also celebrated that – according to him – there were no murders of political leaders like those that occurred in other six-year terms. However, the political-criminal violence monitoring Votar Entre Balas recorded 130 acts of violence against candidates or aspirants to office during the 2023-2024 electoral period, of which 34 were murders, making them the most violent elections in the country.
López Obrador also said that a cardinal was not murdered, in reference to the murder of Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo in May 1993, although in June 2022 two Jesuit priests were killed in the northern state of Chihuahua, sparking outrage in the Catholic Church.
The president also mentioned that there have been no accidents in which Secretaries of the Interior have died, such as that of Francisco Blake Mora in 2011 and that of Juan Camilo Mouriño in November 2008, both of which occurred during the government of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). This is despite the plane crash that killed the governor of Puebla, Martha Erika Alonso, and her husband, Senator Rafael Moreno Valle, both from the opposition National Action Party (PAN), on December 24, 2018.
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