Accountability for Crimes in Mexico

The team documented and verified 75 incidents of killings, enforced disappearances, and other grave physical violence against journalists and human rights defenders across the six-year term. The victims share a profile: reporters covering organized crime, corruption, and state abuses, and defenders working on land, environmental, women’s rights, and disappearance cases. Many had reported threats to the authorities, and several were enrolled in the federal Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders and Journalists when they were killed. In the substantial majority of cases, no one has been convicted. Our analysis examines the state’s failure to protect people it knew to be at risk and the structural impunity that persisted throughout the administration. We also created a searchable database with the 78 journalists and 259 human rights defenders killed under the López Obrador administration, for a total of 337 victims.

Despite President López Obrador’s repeated public assurances that the government did not spy on journalists or critics, forensic research confirmed that Pegasus spyware continued to be deployed against them during his term. In addition to Pegasus, the Mexican military procured a number of other powerful surveillance tools which are deployed on its own civilian population. Our team traced the acquisition and operation of the spyware to SEDENA, drawing on procurement records, court filings, and the approximately six terabytes of internal SEDENA email and documents exposed in the 2022 Guacamaya breach. The investigation maps the military units and commercial intermediaries involved, and documents SEDENA’s denials and obstruction of the criminal complaints that followed.

From the podium of his daily presidential press conference, President López Obrador repeatedly named and denounced individual journalists and human rights defenders. Our team documented this rhetoric alongside the coordinated online harassment campaigns that followed it, including networks of inauthentic accounts linked to state-run media, and the use of criminal defamation statutes, civil damages suits, and fabricated criminal charges to punish critical reporting. The investigation examines how these methods singled out critics, exposed them to threats, and formed part of a broader attack on those who report on or defend the public interest.