Anniversary of Brad Will’s Murder

Each October, journalists and human rights advocates mark the anniversary of Brad Will’s death — a killing that, years later, remains formally unresolved, its actual perpetrators never definitively identified or held accountable.

A Journalist Embedded in the Movement He Covered

Brad Will was a 36-year-old video journalist affiliated with the New York City Independent Media Center when he traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, in early October 2006, drawn by a teacher-led protest movement that had grown into a broader uprising against the state’s governor, Ulises Ruiz. Will had a long history embedded in grassroots and activist movements well before Oaxaca — he had hosted a show on the pioneering microradio station Steal This Radio, fought to protect New York City’s community gardens from demolition, and spent years documenting struggles throughout Latin America as part of the global Indymedia network, according to Democracy Now!’s coverage of his death and the friends who remembered him afterward.

On October 27, 2006 — what would become the single bloodiest day of the Oaxaca uprising — Will was filming from behind a barricade at Santa Lucía del Camino when armed men opened fire on protesters from a distance of roughly 30 to 40 meters. Will was shot in the chest and died en route to the hospital, his camera still recording as he fell. He was one of five people killed that day alone, and one of at least 20 to 26 people who died over the course of the broader conflict, according to accounts collected by Justseeds and other outlets covering the killing in its immediate aftermath.

A Case Marked by Irregularity From the Start

What has made Will’s death a continuing point of outrage among press freedom and human rights advocates isn’t simply the killing itself, but the deeply contested handling of the investigation that followed. In October 2008, Mexican authorities accused Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno — a baker and sympathizer of the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, the protest coalition Will had been documenting — of the murder. Martínez Moreno spent roughly two years in jail awaiting trial, even as many close observers of the case, including members of Will’s own family, believed he was innocent, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ reporting on the case’s third anniversary.

Meanwhile, a group of armed men photographed and filmed firing directly in the direction where Will stood at the moment he was shot — men that human rights groups, independent investigators, and Will’s family have consistently pointed to as the likely actual perpetrators — have never faced charges. Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, along with Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights, have repeatedly faulted Mexican authorities for failing to conduct a genuinely thorough investigation incorporating the extensive photographic, video, and witness evidence available from the scene.

Part of a Broader Pattern of Impunity

Will’s case has never existed in isolation. At least 18 other protesters were killed during the 2006 Oaxaca conflict without any resulting arrests or accountability, according to CPJ’s reporting — a pattern of impunity that press freedom advocates argue reflects a much larger, systemic failure in Mexico to seriously investigate violence against journalists and activists, rather than an isolated lapse specific to Will’s case. Years after Will’s killing, authorities would go on to name yet another suspect, Lenin Osorio Ortega, in a further attempt to resolve the case — a development that, rather than settling the matter, only underscored how unresolved and contested the official account of Will’s death has remained.

For those who continue to mark the anniversary of his death, the ongoing absence of genuine accountability is itself part of what’s being commemorated: a reminder that documenting state violence, as Will did with his camera until the moment he was struck, can carry a cost that, in Oaxaca and far too many places like it, is rarely paid by those actually responsible.

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