How disinformation caused a journalist to flee her country

As a television journalist for CNN Espanol in Guatemala’s capital, Michelle Mendoza reported on big stories, including a deadly volcanic eruption.

“From 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., whatever happens will be covered,” Mendoza said. “My forte is reporting human history.”

Mendoza also reported on more controversial stories, including traveling with migrant caravans moving north through Guatemala to the U.S. and reporting on violent attacks on those migrants by the Guatemalan military.

After 2017, spurred by a United Nations report from the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, she began investigating allegations of criminal networks operating within the country’s government – ​​accused of corruption, organized crime and human rights abuses.

“They come to show us, and not just the journalist, to the entire Guatemalan people how corruption is embedded in our state,” Mendoza explained.

Attacks on Mendoza’s reporting

Shortly after she began reporting on these allegations, Mendoza received a chilling warning.

“A source talked to me and she told me, ‘Hey, you gotta be careful because I’m getting information that the government might pay $50,000 to rape you,’” she said.

Things escalated in 2020 when she said a new government was coming to power. False information about Mendoza appeared online, affecting her reputation, her abilities as a journalist and as a mother.

“When I say, ‘This is happening now in the government palace,’ whatever I publish, they say, ‘No, she does that because she receives money for political causes, she is a prostitute, she is someone’s lady.’ Mendoza recalled. “They said I had three or four houses in my country because I receive a lot of money for publications. No, it’s not true.”

Mendoza makes a life-changing decision

The disinformation would soon become a gateway to much darker danger. The harassment became so bad for Mendoza that she started a group chat with eight friends and forwarded the correspondence she received as a kind of real-time account of the attacks. She believes the evidence also strengthened her case when she left Guatemala.

In 2023, Mendoza made the drastic decision to seek asylum in the US and flee her country. The asylum application she shared with Scripps News chronicled years of intimidation and terror. Mendoza said she was stalked and photographed at the grocery store and in a park with her daughters. The filing also stated that the Guatemalan military had sent a funeral wreath with her name on it to her parents’ home. Mendoza also described a sexually explicit video call while she was in the US for work.

“I answered the call and there was a video,” she told Scripps News, describing a sex act a man was doing. “He said to me, ‘That will happen to you if you go back to Guatemala.’” In the days after that phone call, she was threatened with rape if she did not stop her reporting.

Mendoza says she felt so unsafe even at home that she recruited friends in the neighborhood to keep an eye out for unknown people and cars driving through the streets.

She bluntly said she feared she would be killed while living in Guatemala: “Yes, of course.”

Not the only one

For a growing number of female journalists around the world, online harassment, fueled by disinformation and spread on social media platforms, is leading to real threats of violence. The goal: prevent journalists from reporting.

In a three-year international study by the International Center for Journalists and UNESCO, approximately 1,100 female journalists were interviewed. More than 70% indicate that they have experienced online violence while reporting. More than 40% said violence was part of what they believed was a coordinated disinformation campaign.

“This is not a problem that only occurs in countries that we traditionally associate with despotic regimes and a lack of security for the practice of journalism or in war zones,” says Dr. Julie Posetti, deputy vice president and global director of research at ICFJ. , and one of the editors of the report. “This is an issue that affects women from London to Lagos.”

“Disinformation is a tactic used by malicious actors, misogynistic networks and foreign state actor-led interventions designed to silence critical reporting,” Posetti said. “Female journalists are targeted in such campaigns of misogynistic harassment and abuse. But part of that is often incorporating disinformation stories.”

Potti said there is evidence that these online harassment campaigns are causing targeted female journalists to withdraw.

“They need time,” she added.

When asked what the loss would be to the public if these female journalists were silenced, Posetti responded: “You lose a kind of diverse understanding of life in 2024. So if female journalists are removed from the mix, we have less experiences. Reflecting this means we have fewer sources to be contacted, and we have poorer representation for communities who need to see themselves in the reporting of their lives.

Living in America

Mendoza was granted asylum in the United States in October 2023. Now living in Washington, DC, she is finding her voice again, speaking out about the threat of disinformation against female journalists.

But even in the country she fled to for safety, attacks on Mendoza continued. Scripps News discovered recent social media posts threatening Mendoza.

Scripps News

Translation: A cocaine addicted iguana screaming in anger because her visa has been revoked, and what is not remembered is that she CAN’T enter her own country because she is a drug dealer – and her daughters are growing up with a stepmother, what a jerk Berta .

Scripps News

Translation: What good things has activist Berta Mendoza brought to the country? She did not give anything, neither she nor anyone in her family, on the contrary, her brother Transita Mendoza plundered MIDES and her mother Martina obstructed justice. Iguana

Scripps News

Translation: Now the pseudo-journalist Berta Mendoza Guillotina, aka the Chewing Iguana, has become a crime scene analyst for us. She completed her 2nd year of pure pushing, but she is a great expert in everything.

Scripps News

Translation: fugitives from justice, accused of crimes against humanity

Despite the threats, she still reports for a newspaper in Guatemala, although Mendoza has lost the one thing that means the most to a journalist: her byline – because she is too afraid to put her name on her work.

“I never thought I would be here,” Mendoza said. ‘And I’m grateful. Thank you. But that wasn’t my plan. That wasn’t my choice. I am here because I have no choice for my safety, for my life.”