As a television journalist for CNN Espanol in Guatemala’s capital city, Michelle Mendoza covered big stories including a deadly volcano eruption.
“5 a.m. to 5 p.m. covering whatever is happening,” Mendoza said. “My strong part is covering human histories.”
Mendoza also covered more controversial stories, including traveling with migrant caravans moving north to the U.S. through Guatemala and reporting on violent attacks against those migrants by the Guatemalan army.
After 2017, spurred by a United Nations report stemming from the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, she started investigating accusations of criminal networks operating within the country’s government — accused of corruption, organized crime and human rights abuses.
"They come to show us, not just the journalist, to all Guatemalan people, how the corruption was encrusted in our state,” Mendoza explained.
Attacks on Mendoza's Reporting
Soon after she began reporting on those allegations, Mendoza received a frightening warning.
“A source talk to me and she told me, ‘Hey you need to be careful because I receive the information that the government is going to pay maybe $50,000 to rape to you,’” she said
It escalated in 2020 when she said a new government came into power. False information about Mendoza appeared online attacking her reputation, her ability as a journalist and as a mother.
“If I put, ‘This is happening right now on the government palace,’ whatever that I publish, they put, ‘No, she’s doing that because she’s receiving money about political things, she’s a prostitute, she’s a lady of someone,’” Mendoza recalled. “They said that I had three or four houses in my country because I receive a lot of money for published. No, it's not true."
Mendoza Makes a Life-Changing Decision
The disinformation would soon become a gateway to much darker danger. The harassment got 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 record of the attacks. She believes that evidence also helped bolster her case when she left Guatemala.
In 2023, Mendoza made the drastic decision to apply for asylum in the U.S. and flee her country. The asylum application that she shared with Scripps News cataloged years of harassment and terror. Mendoza said she was stalked and photographed in the supermarket and in a park with her daughters. The application also stated that the Guatemalan army sent a funeral wreath to her parent’s home with her name on it. Mendoza also detailed a sexually explicit video call while she was in the U.S. for work.
“I answered the call and there was a video,” she told Scripps News, describing a sexual act that a man was doing. “He told me, ‘That is going to happen to you if you go back to Guatemala.’” In the days after that call, she received threats of 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 unfamiliar people and cars that were driving through the streets.
She bluntly shared that she feared she would be killed while living in Guatemala: “Yes, of course.”
Not the Only One
For an increasing number of female journalists around the globe, online harassment fueled by disinformation and spread on social media platforms is leading to real-world threats of violence. The goal: stop the journalists from reporting.
A three-year international study by the International Center for Journalists and UNESCO surveyed about 1,100 women journalists. More than 70% said they experienced online violence while reporting. More than 40% said that violence was part of what they thought was a coordinated disinformation campaign.
“This is not a problem that's only in countries that we have traditionally associated with despotic regimes and a lack of security for the practice of journalism or in war zones,” said 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 malevolent actors, misogynistic networks, foreign state actor-led interventions designed to silence critical reporting,” said Posetti. “Women journalists are targeted in such campaigns with misogynistic harassment and abuse. But part of that is often an inclusion of disinformation narratives.”
Posetti said evidence suggests that these online harassment campaigns tend to cause the targeted female journalists to retreat.
“They need to take time,” she added.
When asked what the loss for the public would be if these women journalists were silenced, Posetti responded, “You're losing kind of diverse understanding of life in 2024. So, if women journalists are removed from the mix, then we have fewer experiences being reflected, we have fewer sources being contacted, and we have poorer representation for communities who need to see themselves in the coverage of their lives.”
Life In America
Mendoza was granted asylum in the United States in October 2023. She’s now living in Washington, D.C., and finding her voice again, speaking out on the threat of disinformation to female journalists.
However, even in the country she fled to for safety, the attacks on Mendoza continued. Scripps News found recent social media posts threatening Mendoza.
Translation: A cocaine-addicted iguana screaming in anger because her visa is revoked, plus what is not remembered is that she CANNOT enter her own country because she is a drug dealer--and her daughters are growing up with a stepmother, what a jerk Berta.
Translation: What good things has activist Berta Mendoza brought to the country? She has not given anything, neither she nor anyone in her family, on the contrary, her brother Transita Mendoza looted MIDES and her mother Martina, obstructed justice. Iguana
Translation: Now the pseudo–Journalist Berta Mendoza Guillotina, alias the chewing iguana, has become a crime scene analyst for us. She finished her 2nd grade with pure pushing, but she is a great expert in everything.
Translation: fugitives from justice, accused of crimes against humanity
Despite the threats, she is still reporting for a newspaper in Guatemala, though Mendoza has lost the one thing that means the most to a journalist: her byline – because she’s too afraid to put her name on her work.
“I never thought to be here,” Mendoza said. “And I'm grateful. Thank you. But that wasn't my plan. That wasn't my choice. I'm here because I don't have a choice for my security, for my life.”
