Mexico Passed Speech Laws To Protect The Powerless. The Powerful Used Them To Silence Critics.

from the speech-laws-always-get-weaponized dept

For over a decade, a particular argument keeps resurfacing from well-meaning progressives: the rise of authoritarianism around the globe is a good reason to pass laws suppressing speech. The idea is that somehow, magically, without free speech, authoritarians and fascists would never come to power in the first place. This is historically illiterate. It’s also stupid. As we’ve argued for many, many years, speech suppressing laws are always eventually used by the powerful to suppress the speech of their critics.

The latest example comes from Mexico, where the current leadership has played up “press freedoms,” but at the same time, powerful politicians are using laws ostensibly passed to protect the marginalized… to imprison journalists instead. The New York Times piece makes the pattern concrete in a way that should be eye-opening to many.

Take, for example, the situation with politician Mara Chama Villa. She used a law that was passed to stop “gender-based political violence.” That sounds good, right? Most good folks would agree that “gender-based political violence” is bad. But in this case, Chama Villa claimed that a satirical radio skit mocking her for being a nepobaby candidate violated the law:

It started with a one-minute audio cartoon. Three siblings asked their influential father to buy them candidacies for the upcoming 2024 elections, squabbling over who got to run for which party.

The satirical spot broadcast on Radio Teocelo, the local community-run radio station that also produced the ad, did not mention names, actual political parties or locations.

But Mara Chama Villa, who was running to represent the area in Congress with Mexico’s Ecologist Green Party — and whose father had been the mayor of Teocelo, a coffee-producing town in the state of Veracruz, the deadliest for journalists — felt targeted. She filed a complaint against Radio Teocelo and reporters from other outlets who had previously covered her failed attempt in 2021 to succeed her father as mayor.

Their coverage, she argued in legal filings reviewed by The New York Times, minimized her career and hurt her chances to win the election.

In April 2025, a federal court found five reporters guilty of gender-based political violence because they had “minimized” Ms. Chama Villa “by subordinating her to a male figure with political power,” the court said in its ruling.

The impact of being found guilty — again, for making a satirical radio spot that would be common all over the globe — was pretty massive:

The penalties were sweeping: fines exceeding a month’s salary, mandatory public apologies, the deletion of the radio spot and all denounced articles and placement on a national registry of gender-violence offenders.

Oh, and some more chilling effects, just for fun. If you criticized the ruling? Well, you got added to a follow-on legal process:

When journalists, analysts and organizations across Mexico criticized the outcome, the dispute ballooned into a nationwide case targeting about 70 people.

This is, quite obviously, the opposite of freedom of the press or freedom of speech. And I’d argue it does not do anything positive towards stopping “gender-based political violence.” It’s just become a tool for a powerful political family to punish journalists who produced a bit of satire.

And this isn’t a one-off, as the Times highlights other cases using the same law to target activists as well:

Earlier this year, a court sanctioned Miguel Alfonso Meza, an anti-corruption activist, for gender-based political violence against Silvia Delgado, a lawyer who represented the notorious drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, best known as El Chapo. Mr. Meza had called her a “narco lawyer” when questioning her candidacy for a criminal judgeship in Mexico’s first-ever judicial election.

When the court later partly revoked the penalties on Mr. Meza, Ms. Delgado said that she would appeal that ruling. Her goal, she added in an interview, was “not to silence anyone, but to fight for dignity.”

“By describing my candidacy as highly dangerous and comparing me to other candidates investigated for drug trafficking,” she said, “he unleashed excessive attacks against me.”

The article also describes a crime reporter who was accused of “terrorism” because his reporting on local drug cartels “caused public panic” leading him to being dragged from his car and arrested (he thought he was being kidnapped). He now admits that he’s stopped chasing stories he used to chase.

The chilling effects in such a system are unavoidable.

Mexican politicians can defend these laws all they like. No one supports gender-based political violence or terrorism — and that’s exactly what makes the laws so useful to the people abusing them. A law nobody can be seen opposing is a law nobody can stop. And so a community radio station gets fined a month’s salary over a one-minute cartoon, an anti-corruption activist gets sanctioned for calling El Chapo’s lawyer a “narco lawyer,” and a crime reporter stops chasing the stories that made him a crime reporter.

This is how it always goes. Every time you hand the state a tool to punish “bad” speech, the people who end up wielding it are whoever holds power — and they get to decide what counts as “bad.”

If that still sounds like a worthwhile trade — speech restrictions now to keep the fascists out later — consider that we ran this exact experiment a century ago. Weimar Germany had hate speech laws. Prosecutors used them against Nazis, including Julius Streicher, the publisher of Der Stürmer, who was convicted and jailed more than once for incitement against Jews. The laws did not stop the Nazis. Indeed, the Nazis used these prosecutions as yet more “evidence” that they were being prosecuted for their beliefs. Then, the Nazis took power, inherited those very tools, and turned them on everyone else. Streicher walked out of the courtroom a martyr and into the Reichstag. The speech laws meant to stop authoritarians became the authoritarians’ speech laws.

So here’s the only test that matters before you back a law like this: imagine the politician you distrust the most holding the pen. Because eventually, they will. And anyone who answers “with this law on the books, they’ll never get into power” is indulging in childishly naive wishful thinking — the same wish that has been losing to authoritarians for as long as there have been authoritarians.

You don’t keep bad people from power by handing the office a weapon and hoping good people get there first. You keep them out with stronger elections, stronger institutions, and an educated public that can see through them.

Not by deciding which speech to outlaw — and then praying you’re always the one holding the pen.

Filed Under: free press, free speech, gender-based political violence, mara chama villa, mexico

Companies: radio teocelo