Journalist Miguel Ángel López Velasco, a security and drug trafficking expert, was killed in his home with his wife and son in the eastern port city of Veracruz, The Associated Press reports. López is the second Mexican journalist killed in less than a week, in the midst of unrelenting attacks against the press, which also includes the kidnapping of another reporter 11 days ago.
The journalist and his family were shot to death the night of June 20, and, according to La Jornada, “at the moment there is little evidence as to who the perpetrators were.”
López wrote a column focusing on crime issues for Notiver newspaper, one of the most widely-circulated dailies in the region.
The state’s governor, Javier Duarte, ordered prosecutors to promptly solve the crime and stressed that Veracruz will not be a home for impunity, W Radio and Azteca Noticias add.
The two recent deaths bring the total number of journalists killing in Mexico since 2000 to 70. The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas has been tracking violent incidents against the press since 2010 in a map of threats to journalism in Mexico.
This blog is produced at The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas at the University of Texas at Austin and funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
