Yolanda Caballero Jacobo's life has been completely broken. For days now, the 39-year-old reporter, who dreamed of being a journalist since she was very little, has not been able to sleep or be calm. Her routine transformed into something she only dares to describe with the word fear. “I have tried what censorship and corruption are, but never anything like this that happened to me. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is wrong because he says that I pointed out the municipal president of Tijuana. I have never said it is her. The only thing I have done is put on the table everything that has happened to me before,” she says by phone. On February 1, Caballero Jacobo's car was set on fire with a Molotov cocktail that unknown individuals threw inside and then fled. What happened happened less than 24 hours after the reporter published a video in which she denounced the accusations that councilor Montserrat Caballero had made on previous occasions and which, she denounced, left her in a position of vulnerability.
“I have always covered Tijuana. I write about migrants, about what a border reporter does. I write about the pothole; of the official who got in line to steal the vaccines from the grandparents who were waiting for her at five in the morning; and who exhibits, and who looks for the victims, that's me,” the reporter tells this newspaper by telephone. On the afternoon of February 1, Yolanda Caballero had gone to the Loma Dorada neighborhood to do an interview, about 14 kilometers from the city center, when one of her collaborators notified her and the people she was still with. , that a car had been set on fire in the street. “Yolanda, do you have a gray truck?” they asked her. “When I came out it was covered in smoke. Afterwards, they showed me the video, I saw the flame that came out and the first thing that came to mind was my son, because sometimes he sits there, in the back of the truck,” she remembers, deeply moved.
The threats
The intimidation, she says, dates back to 2022, when the director of Social Communication of the Tijuana City Council threatened her by phone, because she had exposed, days before, a municipal official, whom she recorded when he began to speak to her in a threatening manner. They told her they could put her in jail. But the situation did not stop there, some time later, she made a note about how another official, who is now Secretary of Welfare, conditioned support for a group of women. It was January 2022 and photojournalist Margarito Martínez had just been murdered in Tijuana. Before publishing her text, a City Council communications spokesperson contacted her and told her that they would give her a reply: “I agreed to listen and add that reply, but they told me that they would give it to me at the vigil of my colleague Margarito. . How do you interpret that?,” she wonders. It was after these events when Caballero Jacobo sought protective measures in the state mechanism.
“It seems that pointing out the Government's irregularities bothers them. And that's why they started attacking me because I can't find any other explanation,” he says about these events that occurred with several local officials. Also about the times in which the Morenoist mayor Montserrat Caballero has mentioned her publicly or, she claims, she has even written directly to her personal telephone number. She “She told me that she was ignorant, that she was desperate. Furthermore, she accuses me by telling me who will pay me. What is it about, where is freedom of expression? Freedom of expression does not exist in Tijuana,” he says.. “I made the video because I had to leave evidence of what was happening.”
“Here all these are attacks on journalists”
Caballero Jacobo insists that she has never accused the councilor of the attack on her car. Furthermore, he is firm that it is important that what happens with her case is not taken as a personal altercation between her and Montserrat Caballero. “I want it to be clear that this, here and wherever, is an attack on a journalist. The fact that they are talking to you and calling you ignorant, that they are talking to you and suggesting who will pay you, because I am publishing a reality of what is happening in Tijuana, that is an attack on journalists, and it is not fair that they are trying to distort the things, because also, to begin with, she is in a position of power,” he says.
In a country like Mexico, where every 13 hours there is an attack against the press, and in a city like Tijuana, considered a new lethal epicenter of violence against communicators, — in 2022 Lourdes Maldonado and Margarito were murdered Martínez—what happens to Caballero Jacobo is not an isolated or uncommon event. Her case joins those of dozens of reporters who, like her, face the attacks that different forms of power impose on those who have the task of reporting throughout the country.
Caballero Jacobo has had to leave Tijuana and is in the process to be accepted by the national protection mechanism. As she speaks she also remembers, and now with regret, when she began her career at a newspaper in Rosarito—a city in Ensenada, about 100 kilometers from Tijuana. “I remember one occasion when I showed a PRI municipal president, who had a cell that they called the karaoke because they took people there and made them “sing” and one day they put some students from the Autonomous University of the State there. Nothing happened. Nothing happens here, there is no cell called karaoke here, were the conclusions of the authorities. They changed my city after that. At that time I was a very innocent reporter. I cried out of anger because I didn't understand why they had to change my city if the only thing I was doing was reporting.”
The journalist is afraid that when President López Obrador is asked about his case, the first thing the president has done is come to the mayor's defense, although he later specifies that it is the Prosecutor's Office who has to investigate. She assures that when one is in positions of power, such as the president or the mayor, the echo of his words have a greater effect than that of any other citizen. “For me it has been very difficult, I have moments of crisis, suddenly I cannot control the fear I feel and at the same time I think, if I had not been a reporter I would not have dragged my family into this situation,” she laments.
This newspaper has consulted the Tijuana City Council directly to find out the version of its representative and close collaborators, without receiving a response.
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