In Mexico, journalists face threats from attackers — and from the system meant to protect them, too
Three years ago, Alberto Amaro was sitting at home when he heard two gunshots. His son, playing in the garden, ran inside in terror. When Amaro reached the front gate, he saw two armed men running down his street.
Amaro, 38, a journalist in the central Mexican state of Tlaxcala, says he immediately reported the shooting to the federal agency responsible for protecting journalists and requested emergency measures. “More than 48 hours passed without a response,” he says. Amaro eventually turned to a court, which ordered security for his family.
His is not an isolated case. What happened to Amaro was one of multiple frightening encounters that exposed shortcomings in Mexico’s federal Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, a program created in 2012 to safeguard people threatened because of their work.
Between 2017 and 2022, eight journalists were killed while enrolled in Mexico’s federal Protection Mechanism, according to a joint investigation by Amnesty International and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Amaro joined the Mechanism in 2019, shortly after founding his outlet. Since then, he has lived through more than 30 violent or menacing encounters, including death threats, detention, gunfire and intimidation linked to his reporting on police, government officials and organized crime.
In 2023, after he reported receiving direct death threats from a mayor, the Mechanism classified Amaro as being at high risk and assigned him bodyguards.
The agency later sought to withdraw his protection despite acknowledging that he remained at high risk. Amaro went to court and a judge ordered authorities to conduct a comprehensive risk assessment.
“I worry about what I publish, whether I’ll be killed when I leave home or make it back that day,” says Amaro, who founded the digital news outlet La Prensa de Tlaxcala in 2019. “I also have to worry about making sure they don’t take away my protection measures.”
A decade fighting for protection and justice
Mexico remains one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists outside of active war zones. CPJ has documented six journalist killings in the country in 2026, five of them in just over two months.
Priscila Pacheco, 34, the eldest daughter of journalist Francisco Pacheco, has spent more than a decade fighting for protection since her father was shot dead outside his home in Taxco, in the Mexican state of Guerrero, in 2016. An investigative journalist who reported on local government corruption, he founded El Foro de Taxco with his wife, Verónica, in 1998.
“I think the hardest thing for me was having to choose a coffin for my father,” says Priscila, the last person to see him alive.
After more death threats, Priscila, her mother and two siblings fled days after the murder, abandoning their home and printing press. More than a decade later, they remain displaced and the killing remains unsolved.
Propuesta Cívica, a Mexican civil society organization that provides legal support to journalists and their families, estimates that 98% of journalist homicides remain unpunished. “The deeper structural problem is that the Mechanism has been given a responsibility that belongs to the state as a whole,” says Vanessa Carrillo, Propuesta Cívica’s codirector.
