It is in the occasions in which Mexico's reality overtly hits the bubble of Mexican soccer that Mexican soccer journos prove more and more unprepared to deal with Mexico's reality. The spontaneous rise of the hashtag #LosTwitterosLiberamosaPulido (#WeTwitterUsersFreedPulido) alludes to average Mexicans reacting to the saturday midnight abduction of Mexican striker Alan Pulido in the outskirts of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas. When the bulk of domestic soccer punditry was getting ready for yet another unchallenging Sunday of Liga Mx finals, social media users took Pulido's drama to reflect on this country's violence which overlaps the blurred lines between authorities and organized crime.
Although there was the pathetic instance of a sports webpage grasping the social hype to advertise content featuring the bio and Instagram pictures of Pulido's photogenic girlfriend -or even some other well-renowned print news outlet tweeting they had the 'full chronicle' just to turn out it was only a brief account by some 'unidentified security official'-, perhaps the gravest omissions belonged to those who labeled the situation as plain 'kidnapping' when no further information was confirmed or researched.
Until very recently, it was more or less easy stuff to present to Mexicans any case of abduction as "kidnapping" (where "kidnappers kidnap as a quick way of getting large sums of money"). In consequence, many politicians and political parties did run campaigns promising 'iron fist policies' like the death penalty or life imprisonment or more army battling druglords. The lines between the bad fellows and the good ones - says this rhetoric- can't be clearer: eradicating kidnappers is only about getting tough. That, to an extent, has changed as result of the documentation of several cases over the last decade of forced disappearances in which individuals in Mexico get abducted without price tag and without return.
Are Mexican soccer journalists required to know that the difference between kidnapping and forced disappearance consists in this latter's being a violation to human rights, international law and -more importantly- implying a tacit collusion between law-enforcers and law-breakers? The answer is absolutely yes insofar as they report on Mexico, they work for the news media and they are, or introduce themselves as, journalists.
Celebrating euphorically a new Liga Mx title for his club inside the dressing room along his employees on Sunday night, Pachuca's owner, Jesús Martínez, was pretty fast to acknowledge three soccer journalists out of a list of names which also included high-profile businessmen and politicians. Why would a multiple club owner be grateful to some journos/pundits? For favorable punditry? If the answer is yes, we would be forced to admit that Mexican soccer journalists are not prepared to deal with Mexico's reality by minimun standards whenever it hits the bubble of Mexican soccer because they are not journalists in the first place. They can be relatives of someone, the lucky or the well-connected. But not journalists.
One thing we do know for sure: they didn't free Pulido. Mexican twitter users did.