The Guardian rounds up the best comments, questions and answers from our recent live chat on tomorrow's journalist – what tools and skills will they need to survive and thrive?
Absolutely gobsmacked by an article about the lawless drug situation in Mexico.
I was aware the trouble has made the headlines more than once over the past year; 35 bodies being dumped in the middle of a motorway in Veracruz in broad daylight; 27 found decapitated on a farm in Guatemala; Acapulco, once a top holiday destination for the rich and famous witnessed 900 deaths this year... the list goes on.
In 2010, drug wars claimed 15,273 lives, taking the death toll - since President Felipe Calderon declared war on the drug cartels in 2006 - to over 45,000. So extreme is the death toll at the moment that the government - which declared 2011 to be Mexico's "year of tourism" - had to stop publishing the count!
The article reveals the high cost for journalists attempting to bring those involved to justice. In England, what would be a Fourth Estate role for the journalist, exposing corrupt officials and authorities, is in Mexico a deadly pursuit. Journalists there literally put their lives on the line by writing articles about Mexico's drug trade as it is "bad for business". Two Twitter users were recently found hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo after blogging information and pictures related to drug trafficking there.
A clear message from the cartels: "If you write about us, you will pay for it."
It is a market driven situation: and the market is us, 'the west', and particularly the US. Such quite simple dynamics (such as the similar one driving 'economic migration' - massive inequalities in inter-state wealth) are rarely discussed in discussions of these problems. Mexico can be assisted in its attempts at law enforcement, Africans washing up on (or drowning on the way to) Europe can be interned in camps and sent back. But underlying these symptoms (migratory flows, anomie and violence) and the causes lying in the structure of the status quo - massive inequalities in wealth, power, and standard of living between 'the west' and 'the rest'. Why don't we talk about it?