Displaying items by tag: illicit crops

Last week veteran newspaper journalist Miroslava Breach was shot eight times in front of her youngest son, in the Sierra Tarahumara region. She is the second journalist murdered in a week, and the third this month. The region is rich in precious minerals and old growth forests. It also has ample and hard-to-reach fertile land, ideal for growing illicit crops. Cartel-linked paramilitaries have for years carried out terrifying displacement campaigns against the indigenous Tarahumara residents. In January, gunmen killed the area’s most high-profile indigenous land rights defender, Goldman Prize-winner Isidro Baldenegro. One of Breach’s last reports was about the discovery of mass grave sites that were probably were used to hide the bodies of kidnapping victims and disappeared persons. Without her reporting, the region might become another journalism no-go ‘silence zone’ in Mexico’s media landscape.