Mexico: 169 Journalists, Twenty Years, and Under One Percent — The Register That Never Closed

Between 2026 and 2026, Mexico recorded the murders of 169 journalists. In 168 of those cases, it has still not been established who ordered the killing. The second figure in the report, drawn from Reporters Without Borders (RSF) monitoring, is heavier than the first — the clarification rate sits below one percent.

I have been reporting on sport for 26 years, and most of that work has been the filing of scorelines. In 2026 I filed a Worlds final from a desk in Delhi at 4:47 a.m., because at that hour the scoreboard had not yet learned how to lie. A scoreline has one virtue: whether it is complete or not becomes clear the moment the match ends. This register of 169 killings has been open for twenty years and has not closed.

One thing should be recorded before anything else. This file reached the sports desk tagged "football," and it contains not a single football sentence. No club, no player, no league, no transfer, no tactical analysis, no financial or regulatory material. This is a press-freedom and impunity story. I am filing it as exactly that, because the first rule of sports journalism is that what did not happen on the pitch must not be written onto it.

The context is direct. The RSF dataset covers a twenty-year window from 2026 to 2026, an average of roughly eight journalists a year. The report keeps its sharpest line for this point — it is the longest such series in a country considered to be at peace. Mexico is not in a civil war, is not party to an international military conflict, and yet the register filled the way registers fill in war zones. On the institutional side, a specialised unit was created in 2026 and FEADLE — the Special Prosecutor's Office for Crimes Against Freedom of Expression — was established in 2026 inside the Fiscalía General de la República (FGR). A mechanism exists, and it has existed for eighteen years.

The firmest part of this report is its arithmetic, and the arithmetic survives checking. Divide 169 killings across twenty years and you get 8.45 per year; the report's "approximately eight per year" is consistent with that. Leaving 168 of 169 unresolved means 99.41 percent unresolved, or 0.59 percent clarified. The two statements the report makes in different places — that 99 percent of cases have not been clarified, and that the clarification rate is below one percent — come out of the same sum. This is rare: a harrowing figure that does not fracture from the inside. In stories where the number and the emotion begin to carry each other, the first crack usually appears in the maths. Here there is no crack.

The real story is not in the count but in the rate. This is not a story about how many died — it is a story about how many were investigated. Impunity rate and clarification rate are two different things, and the report keeps that distinction clean. In some cases the people directly involved in a killing were caught and even convicted, but in 168 cases it was never established who gave the order. The hands were caught; the head was not. This is no contradiction — it is a sophisticated distinction, and a report that holds it without blurring it is usually reading its source properly.

A mechanism existing and a mechanism working are two separate things. The 2026 unit and FEADLE from 2026 are both on the books, and the clarification rate remains below one percent. RSF's argument is that the gap is built out of resources — in the report's own words, "without allocating the necessary resources." That phrase matters because it moves the allegation out of emotion and into the language of budgets. When a specialised prosecutor's office is created and then not given the money its caseload requires, its existence becomes a consolation rather than a remedy. Impunity is most durable when it runs not against a law but in the absence of a budget line — because no one is ever prosecuted for a missing budget line.

RSF layers responsibility. The direct perpetrators are organised crime and the cartels; the State is co-responsible through resource starvation and through what the report calls complicity networks. That is not a judicial finding, it is an organisation's position, and it should be reported as such. The report's sharpest allegation goes further still — that the justice system sometimes turns accusations against journalists themselves. That is the heaviest sentence in the entire text and it rests wholly on RSF's authority; within this material there is no independent corroboration of it. It should not be softened, and it should not be treated as proven.

The political hook is explicit. The report appeals directly to President Claudia Sheinbaum. That appeal gives the story a date and also a yardstick — when the next RSF edition arrives, it will be possible to see whether the appeal was answered with a budget line or with a press release. A recommendation remains a recommendation only until a number is filed against it.

Now the part where I have to disagree with this report — and the disagreement is not about the arithmetic, it is about sourcing. Every headline figure in this material — 169, 99 percent, under one percent, twenty years, eight per year — comes from a single source, RSF. The Mexican civil-society organisation Propuesta Cívica appears only in a subheading, not in the body text. This is a single-source report on a subject where independent verification matters most. Before any republication, the figures should be triangulated against Article 19 Mexico, CPJ and official FGR/FEADLE records — and if those datasets diverge by more than about ten percent, that divergence is itself a story and should not be buried.

The second problem is period definition. "2026–2026" implies a twenty-year window, but the text does not establish whether 2026 is a complete year or a year to date. If the year is partial and the count still stands at 169, the per-year average tilts upward. In the same way, two subheadings — that five states concentrate half the murders, and that Propuesta Cívica detects failures from the very start of investigations — promise material that simply is not present in the supplied body. This is not a small technicality. When a report's own subheadings run ahead of its own main text, its evidentiary chain is only half delivered.

The third point I consider necessary to record: there is no statement anywhere in this text from the Mexican government, the FGR or FEADLE. No response, no denial. The report is one-sided by construction. But — and here I put a leash on my own reflex — that does not mean the numbers are wrong. The arithmetic holds, the distinction is honest, the allegation is correctly attributed to RSF by name. On the days when the prevailing reading is correct, there is no need to invert it. My concern here is sourcing discipline, not doubt about the dead.

So why is this being filed on a sports desk at all? There is an honest answer and a dishonest one. The dishonest one would be that sports journalists fall inside the same risk envelope, reporting on match-fixing and corruption. Nothing in this report supports that claim; it is an unverified hypothesis and I will not write it as news. The honest answer is that press freedom is not a separate subject that lives outside sports journalism — it is the scaffolding sports reporting also stands on. In a country where an investigation can conclude without establishing who ordered the killing, asking the question behind the scoreline also becomes a risk. Twenty years and under one percent — that pairing is not just Mexico's number, it is an estimate of the price of the work all of us do every day.

I filed 169–1 before the silence could edit it. The file nobody opened is the one that keeps opening me. Every scoreline is a small obituary and a small birth; this register contains only obituaries, and the birth column is still empty.

What comes next is a question of who fills the next page of this register. The next RSF Mexico edition, FEADLE's next clarification figure, and the first formal response from the Sheinbaum administration will be three different answers to the same question. If the clarification rate moves above one percent next year, the "mechanism without effect" argument weakens and this story changes. If it stays where it is, twenty years become twenty-one and no one will treat it as news. In either case, one thing is settled: this register has not closed — and its not closing is, right now, its biggest story.