Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa has provoked outrage in Mexico by saying that the murder of more than 100 journalists in Mexico over the past decade was due to an expansion of press freedom.
“There is more press freedom in Mexico today than 20 years ago, without doubt,” he said in an interview on Monday.
Twelve journalists were last year murdered in the country, putting it on a par with Syria.
Reporters Without Borders last year ranked Mexico at 147 out of 180 countries on its World Press Freedom Index.
However, Vargas Llosa suggested the deaths were a sign that press freedom was improving.
“The fact that more than 100 journalists were murdered is, in grand part, to be blamed on the freedom of the press today, which allows journalists to say things that were not permitted previously. Narcotics trafficking plays an absolutely central part in all of this,” he said.
His comments prompted an immediate and scathing reaction from Mexican reporters.
“Not a word of empathy for the victims of the murdered journalists and even less a reflection on crime organized by the powerful,” tweeted Jenaro Villamil, a reporter with the Proceso weekly.
Vargas Llosa was also criticized for suggesting that drug traffickers are the main source of violence against Mexico’s press.
Organized crime groups have targeted many journalists, but press freedom advocates have said public officials often pose more problems for the media than narcotics traffickers.
Politicians and public officials in Mexico have a long history of threatening, intimidating and even ordering attacks on reporters.
Last year, it was revealed that the country’s government had used spying software to target reporters and activists.
“[He’s] thinking that the main aggressor of journalists in Mexico is organized crime and it’s not like that,” said Javier Garza, former editor of the newspaper El Siglo de Torreon. “The main aggressors of journalists are public officials: government, political parties and public security forces.”
Vargas Llosa’s comments came in an interview with the online radio host Carmen Aristegui, who has herself been forced off air twice after running afoul of the authorities.
It was not the first time that Vargas Llosa has made headlines recently.
In a Sunday column in the Spanish newspaper El Pais, he blasted feminism as “the most determined enemy of literature, which seeks to decontaminate it of machismo, multiple prejudices and immoralities.”
Last month, he admonished Mexicans not to commit “democratic suicide” by voting for the left-wing populist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the country’s July 1 presidential election.
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