Marcela Turati: Investigating Mexico’s enforced disappearances and mass graves: By Elettra Scrivo

“We’re like war correspondents in our own country. We never have to leave the country to cover a war to learn how to be war correspondents -  as we feel as if we’re covering one, and that’s terrible,” says investigative journalist Marcela Turati.

Turati is not talking about Ukraine, Syria, or Yemen - countries actively at war - but Mexico. Excluding war zones, Mexico, a democratic state that supposedly guarantees freedom of expression in its constitution, is considered the most dangerous country in the world for journalists.

And according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 2022 has been the deadliest year on record, with 13 members of the media murdered so far (without counting those reporters who have disappeared).

Turati, 48, who’s been a journalist for half her life, knows all too well the dangers of reporting in Mexico. She’s lost some friends and colleagues who were local journalists covering policing, organised crime, narcopoliitics or corruption. Troublingly, their deaths have occurred not in the field of action, but at their homes or newsrooms.

Those who aren’t murdered, Turati explains, face other types of violence: some are spied on, stigmatised, censored, sued for defamation, physically, digitally and verbally threatened, kidnapped, tortured or “disappeared” – that is, missing, vanished without a trace.

These bleak conditions don’t look set to improve any time soon. Mexico’s deep-seated corruption and organised crime networks are woven into the sociopolitical fabric of the country.“It's ‘encrostado’ - encrusted - in different local, state and federal governments and in many businesses,” Turati explains. 

“As a journalist it’s really shocking. Once you begin investigating any topic, even an environmental issue, you realise there’s a lot of corruption everywhere and that from one moment to the next you could receive a death threat.”

Never was the scale of this corruption so apparent to Turati than when she worked on an investigation into the 43 students who were disappeared, and three more murdered, in Iguala, Guerrero, from the Ayotzinapa's Normal Rural School in September 2014.

She says: “We realised organised crime, the army, the federal police, the municipal police, the government and the prosecutor office were all involved in this case. You think you're covering one thing but then you understand you're in the middle of another thing and that everybody is involved. They tried to cover it up. I had visits from people – impersonators - who said things to confuse me, to send me off track.”

The rampant corruption, in turn, feeds into impunity – no one is arrested or convicted  for killing a journalist – and this is a deadly combination. Most murders are destined to become cold cases, and the perpetrators – who are at times the same people charged with investigating the killings – run free. Mexico has one of the world’s highest number of unsolved murders of journalists, with the percentage constantly hovering between 90 and 95 per cent. Every year, Mexico is in the top ten of the CPJ’s index of impunity.“

It's easy and low cost, to kill a journalist because we are in a system where the killings aren’t investigated,” says Turati. “People who want to silence journalists know that they have guaranteed impunity, so there’s nothing that will protect you.”

Balbina Flores, the Reporter Without Borders (RSF) representative in Mexico, agrees. “The culture of impunity that prevails around the murders and disappearances of journalists has to do with the little political will that there is to really investigate the murders of journalists,” she says.  She adds that while last year there were 13 arrests of the people who carried out the killings, 100 per cent of the people who commissioned those killings are still free.

Nevertheless, Turati persists in what she describes as her “mission”: being a journalist and platforming the stories and voices of others through her work.“

I always wanted to be a journalist. At the beginning I was covering poverty, inequality, social movements, and environmental issues. I was really happy doing narrative journalism. I thought that if journalists focused on these topics then the government might care,” she says.

But then, in 2006, everything changed. Newly-appointed president, Felipe Calderon, launched the war on drugs, which marked the beginning of a never-ending cycle of violence for Mexico (victims are estimated to be more than 360,000 and more than 100,000 are missing) and a career pivot for Turati.“

The violence, the militarisation – it was really, really shocking, so I began focusing on that,” she says. “And then, along with it, I started covering the enforced disappearance of people, mass graves, and the massacre of migrants.”

Turati’s ambitious reporting on these topics won her numerous awards: the Gabriel García Márquez Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2014; the Gabo Journalism Prize in 2018 for her extensive investigation into clandestine graves; and the John Reed medal in 2020 for outstanding journalism. She was also awarded the 2021 Javier Valdez Cárdenas Journalism Award convened by Penguin Random House for her book San Fernando Massacres, due to be published in the spring of next year. This will be Turati’s second book - the first, Crossfire: Victims Trapped in the War on Drugs, was published in 2011.

San Fernando Massacres looks back on her investigation into the 2010 San Fernando Massacre, the murder, by Los Zetas drug cartel, of more than 190 people, whose bodies were discovered in clandestine graves.

The investigation is a particularly memorable one for Turati: it was psychologically and physically draining, but, more than that, through it she became a known figure to the government. Along with a human rights defender and a forensic specialist, she was surveilled and spied on for a year as part of an illegal judicial strategy by the Mexican government – purely because of her reporting of the massacre.

She says: “People kept telling me ‘you’re paranoid,’ but I told them something didn’t feel right. When I realised what had happened I felt sad, shocked and very, very angry. But mostly scared for my sources. If I was under surveillance and the  government knew everything about my work, then how could I guarantee anonymity to my sources?”.

The government’s surveillance had a lasting effect. “If the government spies on you for investigating a massacre that they should’ve investigated in the first place, you start to think about what to do going forward, how to protect yourself, your sources, whether to use a smartphone or not, how to contact people, my sources,” she adds.

Aside from her important investigative work, Turati also shows a great sense of responsibility to the journalistic community in Mexico. Flores, who has worked with Turati on countless occasions, says that she “walks a path of both journalism and activism” and part of this activism is helping journalists deal with the pressures of their work.“

Marcela has always been concerned with the mental health side of the job,” explains Flores. “She’s constantly tried to provide psychosocial support for her colleagues because she’s convinced that this is a fundamental aspect of practicing journalism.”

In 2007 Turati co-founded Periodistas de a Pie (Journalists on the Move), a network dedicated to professionally training local journalists and to promote the establishment of collectives for self-protection. Then, in 2016, she also co-founded Quinto Elemento Lab, an organisation that helps mentor Mexican journalists and help them with their own investigations.

“We are trying to help journalists, to stop them from being silenced and finish their investigations,” Turati says. “We want to defend freedom of speech and journalism in the public interest.” For Turati, having these networks is key in order to survive as a journalist in Mexico. “I have faith that networks can save lives,” she says.

Given the intense pressure of the work, the support provided by these networks and fellow journalists is vital. Losing a colleague is a depressing reality for many reporters in Mexico, and the pain does not go away. Turati describes it not as post-traumatic stress, but as a permanent, perpetual stress because the violence is never ending.“

In the last couple of years my colleagues and I have realised that the most important help we can give fellow journalists is psycho-emotional therapy. In the last year, sometimes, when somebody is killed, with the help of the collectives I call the journalists in the affected area and offer to put them in contact with a therapist to deal with the trauma.”

She admits that the stress of the job can be so great that she sometimes thinks of giving up. Indeed, she yearns for a “normal” life that comes without all the stress, exhaustion and pain.

“I always think ‘this will be the last dangerous story I report on.’ But after five minutes I’m either involved in another investigation or trying to help people in dangerous areas, or working on some collaborative project,” she says.“

I strongly believe that where there is no journalism, death wins. It’s important to come up with different strategies so that journalism can continue to come to light.”

Mexico is ranked 127 out of 180 in RSF’s Press Freedom Index