Just one week from presidential elections in Mexico, a Mexican journalist was stabbed on Sunday, June 24, before entering his house in the city of Oaxaca, in the southeastern part of the country, reported the Center for Journalism and Public Ethics (CEPET in Spanish).
Journalist Rafael Said Hernández, director of the political weekly magazine Revista Tucán, is in critical conditions after receiving a wound close to his artery, which caused an uncontrollable hemorrhage, according to the news site Animal Político. The police detained three of the attackers but the motive of the attack is still undetermined, and the mastermind behind the crime has yet to be identified, reported CEPET.
The journalist's mother, Esperanza Hernández, witnessed the crime and said the attackers told her two sons: "Now you will die for your damn magazine," according to the newspaper El Informador.
The magazine maintains a critical editorial line favoring leftist politics, reported the newspaper Excélsior. Recently, the magazine published about serious human rights violations in 2006, according to the local organization Código DH.
On Wednesday, June 20, a reporter from the newspaper Reforma was arrested while taking pictures for her report about the distribution of gifts with logos of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in Spanish) and of the presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, according to CEPET.
Verónica Jiménez, correspondent of the newspaper Reforma, in the central state of Hidalgo, was threatened while covering a campaign act and was taken as a detainee to the local police department for more than an hour by orders of a PRI campaign coordinator.
Mexico is the most dangerous country for the press in the American continent. See this map about attacks against the Mexican press made by the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas.
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.
