A journalist was among 4 people killed inside a bar in central Mexico, changing into at the least the thirteenth media employee killed in the nation this yr.
San Luis de la Paz Mayor Luis Sánchez stated Ernesto Méndez, director of the news website Tu Voz, or Your Voice, was with 4 different males after they have been attacked. The fifth particular person was critically wounded and brought to a hospital, he stated.
Guanajuato Gov. Diego Rodríguez Vallejo “strongly condemned” the Tuesday evening killings by way of Twitter Wednesday.
Sánchez stated that at this level it was unknown whether or not the assault was associated to Méndez’s journalistic work, his function as consultant of native companies in the planning of an upcoming honest or one thing else.
Press freedom group Article 19 known as on the authorities to provide safety to Méndez’s colleagues and kinfolk.
Méndez had additionally labored till three years in the past at the news website Zona Franca, in accordance to its director Carmen Martínez.
Zona Franca stated that he had obtained threats in the previous, AFP reported. It stated he was celebrating with household and buddies when a bar his household owned was attacked.
It was not instantly clear whether or not Méndez was enrolled in the federal authorities’s safety program for journalists and human rights defenders below menace.
While organized crime is usually concerned in journalist killings, small city officers or politicians with political or legal motivations are sometimes suspects as properly. Journalists working small news shops in Mexico’s inside are simple targets.
Guanajuato, a thriving industrial area, has turn into certainly one of Mexico’s most violent states due to turf wars between rival gangs combating for management of trafficking routes for medication and stolen gas.
Other Mexican journalists killed in 2022
In June, journalist Antonio de la Cruz was shot to death in northeastern Mexico as he was leaving his home together with his 23-year-old daughter. His daughter later died from wounds suffered in the assault that killed her father
In May, two colleagues at a news website have been shot to death in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. The Veracruz State Prosecutor’s Office stated it was investigating the killings of Yessenia Mollinedo Falconi and Sheila Johana García Olivera, the director and a reporter, respectively, of the on-line news website El Veraz in Cosoleacaque.
In March, prosecutors in the western state of Michoacan stated reporter Armando Linares was shot to death at a house in the city of Zitacuaro. His killing got here six weeks after the slaying of a colleague, Roberto Toledo, from the similar outlet, Monitor Michoacan. It was Linares who introduced Toledo’s death Jan. 31 in a video posted to social media.
In early March, gunmen killed Juan Carlos Muñiz, who lined crime for the on-line news website Testigo Minero in the state of Zacatecas.
Jorge Camero, the director of a web-based news website who was till lately a municipal employee in the northern state of Sonora, was killed in late February.
In early February, Heber López, director of the on-line news website Noticias Web, was shot to death in the southern state of Oaxaca.
Reporter Lourdes Maldonado López was discovered shot to death inside her automotive in Tijuana on Jan. 23. In a news convention in 2019, Maldonado Lopez informed Mexico’s president she feared for her life.
Reporter José Luis Gamboa was killed in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz on Jan. 10
Crime photographer Margarito Martínez was gunned down outdoors his Tijuana residence on Jan. 17. Guillermo Arias, whose pictures chronicle life and death in the streets of Tijuana, labored with Martinez for a few years.
He recalled the painful expertise of overlaying the homicide of his pal and fellow journalist.
“His daughter arrived and asked me not to photograph her dad’s body,” Arias informed CBS News.
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