The Human Rights Center today published “Under Attack: Targeting of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders in Mexico,” a public platform presenting the findings of a multi-year investigation into the persecution of journalists and human rights defenders during the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024). The platform documents how journalists and defenders covering crime, corruption, and state abuses were targeted as a group: stigmatized from the presidential podium; harassed online by state-run networks; unlawfully surveilled by the military; subjected to abusive legal process by state officials; and, at the campaign’s most lethal, killed or forcibly disappeared.
The investigation identified 337 journalists and human rights defenders killed during the six-year term—78 journalists and 259 defenders—and found that these killings were the visible edge of a broader attack on the same group, one the state openly encouraged and rarely punished. Impunity for crimes against this group remained between roughly 93 and 99 percent throughout the period.
“Mexico has long been described as one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist or human rights defender, but that framing does not tell the whole story. What we documented is a sustained campaign to punish civic watchdogs for their reporting and advocacy. They were treated as enemies of the state for holding power to account.” — Lindsay Freeman, HRC Senior Director of International Accountability.
The investigation was originally conceived as a legal submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and a test case for the Office of the Prosecutor’s first Policy on Cyber-Enabled Crimes under the Rome Statute, published in December 2025, which recognizes intrusive surveillance and information operations as means of committing crimes against humanity.
When U.S. sanctions on the ICC foreclosed any lawful path to submit that evidence, HRC rebuilt the investigation as a public platform, making its findings and analysis available to journalists, human rights organizations, prosecutors, and the public. The platform includes a database of victims, 75 case files, an AI-assisted analysis of more than 1,400 presidential press conferences, organizational charts of Mexico’s security apparatus, and detailed sections on surveillance, online harassment, abuse of legal process, physical violence, and impunit
In an accompanying article published today in Just Security, “Persecution by Other Means: Mexico and the First Test of the ICC’s Cyber Policy,” Freeman sets out the legal case for treating the Mexican record as cyber-enabled persecution under the Rome Statute and argues that it warrants a preliminary examination.
The article is available at: https://www.justsecurity.org/158283/persecution-mexico-icc-cyber-policy/
To access the platform: https://hrcberkeley.github.io/under-attack-in-mexico/
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Press inquiries: Maggie Andresen, mandresen@berkeley.edu
Image caption: Relatives of the late Mexican journalist Margarito Martinez, murdered on January 17, 2022 outside his house, carry flower arrangements after the commemoration of the first anniversary of his murder at Plaza Libertad de Expresion (Freedom of Speech Plaza) in Tijuana, Baja California state, Mexico, on January 17, 2023. Photo by Guillermo Arias / AFP via Getty Images.