Last Tuesday night in Mexico City I headed to a bar with some press colleagues. It was late and the bar was lit with candles for mood lighting. As we sat down to order drinks my friend Joan took hold of the candle in front of her and said, 'I'll hold onto this for the next journalist to be murdered.'
We had been at a vigil to mourn the murder of renowned journalist Javier Valdez and to protest the ever-escalating number of journalist murders in the country in a legal and political climate of almost total impunity.
Valdez was a highly respected reporter and critic of the drug cartels and the Mexican government's war on drugs, and had expected his death to come at the hands of the powerful drug traffickers in Sinaloa where he was based. He was the fifth journalist to be killed in Mexico this year, and the 26th to be killed since 2006.
In the crowd of around 500 journalists and allies who gathered outside the Secretarí a de Gobernació (the country's interior ministry), many had themselves been kidnapped or knew and loved others who had; many had already lost other close colleagues before this year has even hit its halfway mark.
Joan was joking in that dark way that people do when they know there's little hope. Hope is something I asked everybody about that night — do you have hope that anything could change? That the murders could stop? That the disappeared could return? That there could be solutions to the political and economic corruption that strangles the country?
Everyone had their own take on why the situation is as it is, but they were united in telling me they had no hope, that it was all 'fucked', that they they were just keeping on keeping on; and anyway, let's get more chelas and mezcal and keep talking, tonight.
Naturally, I was shocked and saddened by the murder of Valdez, as I am every time the news comes that another journalist has been killed. As a writer myself who occasionally reports on Mexico it's frightening, though I know that my white skin, Australian passport, and general biographical distance from the issues makes me the least likely candidate for that next candle.
Few of these feelings appeared on the surface of my friends' bodies as we sat around the bar. You learn, I guess, to manage them with cynicism, alcohol, and