It’s too dangerous for one Mexican newspaper to keep publishing.
El Norte, a newspaper in the city of Juarez, which is close to the U.S. border, printed its last issue with the headline “Adios!” on Sunday.
The local paper, which has been around for 27 years and had a distribution of around 30,000, said the recent killings of journalists in the country led to the shutdown.
Norte executive Oscar Cantu Murguia said that his employees’ lives are too high a price to pay for the paper’s existence.
“Everything in life has a beginning and an end, a price to pay,” Cantu wrote in an editorial. “And if this is life, I am not prepared for any more of my collaborators to pay it, nor with my own person.”
“On this day, esteemed reader, I address you to report that I have made the decision to close this newspaper due to the fact that, among other things, there are neither the guarantees nor the security to exercise critical, counterbalance journalism,” Cantu wrote.
Norte correspondent Miroslava Breach, who was also a reporter for newspaper La Jornada, was gunned down as she left her home. A note calling her a “loud-mouth” was left at the scene, the BBC reported at the time.
“The tragic and heartfelt death of Miroslava Breach Velducea, our collaborator, on March 23rd, has made me reflect on the adverse conditions in which the practise of journalism is developing today,” Cantu wrote.
At least 38 journalists have been killed since 1992 because of what they do, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. The motives of another 50 are unconfirmed, CPJ says.
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“Mexico is clearly going through a deep, full-blown freedom of expression crisis,” CPJ’s Americas program co-ordinator Carlos Lauria told the Associated Press.
“It’s affecting Mexicans, not only journalists, because the fact that a newspaper closes is depriving people of information that they need in order to take informed decisions.”
Cantu also mentioned financial concerns that he blamed on authorities: The arrogant refusal to pay debts contracted for the provision of services.”
In Mexico, government advertising is a major source of revenue for many news outlets, and media critics say reliance on that often leads to tame coverage and self-censorship.
For Cantu, closing the paper is a form of protest.
“It is my way of protesting with silence,” he told the Washington Post.
He also said that reporters in Mexico are “treated as the evil of society,” and compared it to how Donald Trump called journalists the “enemy of the people.”
In February, Donald Trump branded many national news agencies “the enemy of the American people” on Twitter, claiming that they were fake news.
READ MORE: Donald Trump brands mainstream media ‘enemy of the American people’
The tweet was widely criticized by critics and fellow Republicans alike; U.S. Republican Senator John McCain warned that suppressing the free press was “how dictators get started.”
In addition to Breach, who was gunned down as she left home March 23, two other journalists were killed in Guerrero and Veracruz, both states that are hotspots of drug cartel violence.
Another journalist was shot in Poza Rica, Veracruz, March 29, leaving him in critical condition. And an armed attack on a journalist in San Jose del Cabo, Baja California Sur, left his bodyguard dead.
— With files from the Associated Press
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