The Fear Remains. Critical journalism in displacement and resistance

For critical journalism, the contemporary Mexican context has meant a daily battering as professionals who exercise freedom of expression, involving a latent risk against their own lives, their physical, mental, and psychosocial integrity and that of their closest networks.

Since the founding of Aluna, we have accompanied people who practice critical journalism in different stages of their life experience and confrontations with sociopolitical violence: in times of repression, while mourning, during phases of displacement and exile, while reconstructing their professional, political, and life projects and others.

In this research, we present five testimonies of journalists in Mexico who have been victims of sociopolitical violence in Mexico within the last ten years and, as a result, have been forced to opt for displacement as a security measure, facing the risk in the town where they practiced their journalistic activities. We have found that fear is an aspect that is commonly expressed in these processes, which is why we decided to revisit this category in a cross-cutting fashion throughout the research. In parallel, we recognize its implementation as a political strategy of power players who, through it, aim to achieve objectives as well as private, political, social, economic, or military interests or a combination of these.

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