Publicament: Can the Media Kill People?

When Armando Vega Gil, the Mexican bassist of the satire rock band, Botellita de Jerez, took his own life this month, you could say: “another troubled rock star who killed himself as it happens in the US or the rest of the world”, if he didn’t do it after being -in his own words- “falsely” accused on Twitter of expressing his sexual desire to a 13 year old girl.

As shocking it is, this is not the first time that Mexico witnessed how a public figure takes a leap into the void pushed by the media. I don’t know if anywhere is a common thing to go public with an accusation and people wanting to be dead.

The first death I can think of was that of Raúl Ramos Tercero, the Undersecretary of Regulation in the Secretary of Commerce and Industrial Development, in September 2000, at the end of the government of former President Ernesto Zedillo. 

The undersecretary saw in suicide a way to “satiate those who are thirsty for blood,” in reference to journalists who saw nonexistent “irregularities” in the complaints of the governor of Tlaxcala, Beatriz Paredes, about the Federal Automobile Registry (RENAVE), and in that the concessionaire company was headed by the former torturer of the Argentine dictatorship, Ricardo Miguel Cavallo. Far from it, the press speculated that he had been killed.

Those who worked close to him, we knew what really happened: Before cutting his veins in the woods, he apologized to some officials (and then it was clear that also to say goodbye), for his only fault: a planning that underestimated workloads and thereby delayed the start-up day of the company.

Regarding the complaints of the governor, they were contemplated by a law that at the same time did not establish any obligation to investigate the past of the members of the concessionaire outside the country. So no irregularities or crimes, but the press created them anyway.

Both Ramos Tercero and Vega Gil considered that the unfounded attack by the media caused “endless terror”, which, by destroying their reputation, created a burden for their families and forced to be consider a debt to their families to be paid with their own lives to maintain for them “a clean road” ahead for them.

However, regarding the responsibility of the media in their deaths, they showed a great difference.

By describing in his farewell tweet the current state of freedom of expression, the musician subscribed the existence of an “inalienable right to complaint (in the media), especially to women”, even if done anonymously.

It is a right won as victims “crushed by fear and threat” that justifies that the accused to lose the right to a defense in the court of public opinion “where there is no room for advocacy; everything I say will be used against me,” wrote the bassist and singer.

For him, this right was so just and supreme, that by summarily granting the punishment of being deprived of any future work and social rejection (as happened to Kevin Spacey), makes futile the (legal) process that would allow to make a case by the hand of attorneys, “evidence and witnesses”.

On the contrary, for the undersecretary the scrutiny of the media was often unfair, containing false information, vileness and malice, in addition to the ill effort to criminalize people, as he expressed in a letter he left for the Mexican newspaper Reforma.

Instead of endorsing the state of freedom of expression, he wrote to the director of the director of the daily:, “the newspaper and you, to whom do you respond?” And added: “The damage you did to me, to the country, to the institutions, when will you pay for it?”

At that time, the columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio, among other renowned opinion leaders, answered that the media had no responsibility in the death of Ramos Tercero. Today who manages the Twitter account #MeTooMusicosMexicanos said that he also did not in the death of Vega Gil. What do you think?