Remembering Alicia Diaz Gonzalez: A brave Mexican journalist killed in Monterrey- Mexico

This month last year, our colleague Alicia Diaz Gonzalez was killed in Mexico. In honor of her memory the Coalition For Women In Journalism will be thinking about Alicia this May.

On May 25th, 2018 Alicia Diaz Gonzalez became the fifth Mexican journalist to be killed in 2018 alone, in a violent attack at her home in Monterrey, Mexico.

Gonzalez was found dead in her home, having apparently been severely beaten.

The 52-year-old reporter was a collaborator* of the newspaper El Financiero y Reforma, since early January 2018. She was a financial writer for one of Mexico’s largest publications, as described by many.

Gonzalez had been working as a journalist since the 1990’s. She first wrote for Mexico’s El Norte before moving over to El Financiero in January. Her beat did not include any coverage tied to organized crime or the ongoing territorial disputes within drug cartels.

Her friends wrote about her on Twitter expressing the loss: “Her name was Alicia Diaz Gonzalez, she was beaten to death in her house in Monterrey. Until when? Enough of impunity, we want the state to guarantee our security.”

During May 2018, radio journalist Juan Carlos Huerta was shot dead as he left his home in a suburb of Villahermosa in southeast Mexico.

His murder took place one year after journalist Javier Valdez, who received international recognition for his coverage of drug trafficking, was shot dead in his native Culiacan, Sinaloa, where powerful cartels operate.

He was pulled from his car on May 15, 2017, and shot 12 times.

At least five journalists, including Alicia Diaz Gonzalez, have been murdered in Mexico so far in 2018. At least two were killed as a direct result of their work, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

Mexico is considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist with more than 100 reporters killed since 2000. Most of those crimes remain unpunished.

The Coalition For Women In Journalism CFWIJ finds the ongoing murders and attacks targeting journalists in Mexico without any means of follow up or punishment, alarming. We urge the authorities to provide a better and safer environment for journalists in

Mexico and specifically women journalists. Crime does not only involve unsolved murders of women journalists in Mexico, but bullying, death threats and online harassment have been growing in the past months according to our Data.

Both online trolling and physical harassment in Mexico has been on the rise.

The CFWIJ believes this is mostly due to the impunity with which crimes and threats against women journalists are committed. Among over a dozen cases of attacks and murders of women journalists in Mexico, not a single one has been thoroughly investigated or given the opportunity of justice.

*a widely used term in the journalism industry is ‘fixer’ — we at the CFWIJ strictly discourage the term fixer and encourage replacing it with more respectful terms. We propose ‘coordinator’ as a more appropriate term to be used