An impartial journalist found dead in northern Mexico was killed by a blow to the head, authorities mentioned Tuesday, reporting the newest in 14 slayings of Mexican reporters and media employees to this point this year, the deadliest in current reminiscence for the occupation.
Prosecutors in the border state of Sonora introduced earlier that the physique of Juan Arjón López had been found in the border metropolis of San Luis Rio Colorado. They mentioned the journalist, who had been reported lacking Aug. 9, was recognized from the tattoos on his physique.
According to the post-mortem, López died from “head trauma due to a blunt blow,” the state Public Ministry mentioned in an announcement.
The state’s chief prosecutor, Claudia Contreras, mentioned investigators would search to find out if the killing was associated to López’s work as a journalist.
Press freedom group Article 19 mentioned it was documenting the occasions surrounding López’s disappearance and loss of life.
San Luis is throughout the border from Yuma, Arizona, and has lengthy been identified for medical and dentistry places of work catering to Americans. But the space has been hit by drug cartel violence in current years.
In March, volunteer searchers found 11 our bodies in clandestine burial pits in a stretch of desert near a rubbish dump in San Luis.
At the starting of August, a journalist was amongst 4 folks killed inside a beer store in the central Mexico state of Guanajuato.
Authorities mentioned it was unknown whether or not that assault was associated to the journalist’s work, his function as consultant of native companies in the planning of an upcoming truthful or one thing else.
While organized crime is commonly concerned in journalist killings, small city officers or politicians with political or prison motivations are sometimes suspects as effectively. Journalists operating small news shops in Mexico’s inside are simple targets.
Mexico is taken into account the most harmful country for reporters exterior a conflict zone.
Other journalists killed in Mexico in 2022
Earlier this month,  journalist Ernesto Méndez was amongst 4 folks killed inside a bar in central Mexico.
In June, journalist Antonio de la Cruz was shot to loss of life in northeastern Mexico as he was leaving his home along 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 web site had been shot to loss of life in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. The Veracruz State Prosecutor’s Office mentioned it was investigating the killings of Yessenia Mollinedo Falconi and Sheila Johana GarcÃa Olivera, the director and a reporter, respectively, of the on-line news web site El Veraz in Cosoleacaque.
In March, prosecutors in the western state of Michoacan mentioned reporter Armando Linares was shot to loss of life at a house in the city of Zitacuaro. His killing got here six weeks after the slaying of a colleague, Roberto Toledo, from the identical outlet, Monitor Michoacan. It was Linares who introduced Toledo’s loss of life Jan. 31 in a video posted to social media.
In early March, gunmen killed Juan Carlos Muñiz, who coated crime for the on-line news web site Testigo Minero in the state of Zacatecas.
Jorge Camero, the director of a web-based news web site who was till not too long ago a municipal worker in the northern state of Sonora, was killed in late February.
In early February, Heber López, director of the on-line news web site Noticias Web, was shot to loss of life in the southern state of Oaxaca.
Reporter Lourdes Maldonado López was found shot to loss of life inside her automotive in Tijuana on Jan. 23. In a news convention in 2019, Maldonado Lopez advised 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 MartÃnez was gunned down exterior his Tijuana dwelling on Jan. 17. Guillermo Arias, whose images chronicle life and loss of life 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 advised CBS News.
story by The Texas Tribune Source link