Amid Threats and Break-ins, I Won't Stop Investigating the Missing 43 Students Anabel Hernandez - The World Post
go to original November 24, 2015

Mexico: New Wave of Attacks Against Critical Journalists (teleSUR English)

Editor's note: The Huffington Post received the following letter from journalist Anabel Hernández detailing a threat she received this month clearly aimed at scaring her away from carrying out her work. Hernández is a HuffPost contributor and one of Mexico's most accomplished investigative journalists.

Since November of last year, Hernández and her colleague at the U.C.-Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program, Steve Fisher, have published a series of groundbreaking articles that flatly contradict the Mexican government's account of the attacks against the students in Iguala, in which six people were killed and 43 students abducted.

I'm writing to make public that I received a threat on Nov. 4 in my home in Mexico City that resulted from my work as an investigative reporter.

In Mexico, the brutal truth is that journalists get murdered for doing their work. More than 100 journalists have been killed over the last decade and the vast majority of their killers enjoy total impunity. In 2015 alone, at least seven journalists have been killed: Rubén Espinosa, Gerardo Nieto, Armando Saldaña, Abel Manuel Bautista, Filadelfo Sánchez, Juan Mendoza and Moisés Sánchez.

For years, I've struggled to avoid becoming another number on the list of murdered journalists. The threats I've suffered over the last five years have affected my life and that of my entire family. In spite of that, I'm not going to abandon the reporting I'm doing, because this is work of public interest and our society deserves to be informed.

On Nov. 4 of this year in the middle of the day, my home was again broken into by a group of at least four people who arrived in a new-model car. Security footage revealed the attackers consisted of at least one driver - who never left the car - one woman, and two other men.

Even though they saw the security cameras, the woman and the two men broke into the apartment complex where I live, without attempting to hide their faces. They spent nearly half an hour inside my home, but the group didn't steal anything of value, though they had ample opportunity to do so.

Instead, they left me a threat. The people who broke into my home took a framed picture of my children that had been tucked away out of view and put it face down out in the open.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

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