Mexican journalist Salvador Adame Pardo, 45, has been missing for almost a month after a group of gunmen abducted him on May 18 in the city of Nueva Italia, in the municipality of Múgica, in Michoacán state.
Adame Pardo – founder and owner of channel 6 TV, along with his wife Frida Urtiz Martínez, of Múgica, Michoacán – has been critical of the work of state authorities and management of the municipal president of Múgica, Salvador Ruiz Ruiz, according to Animal Político.
According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Adame is the fifth journalist to disappear in Michoacán since 2006. José Antonio García Apac (2006), Mauricio Estrada Zamora (2008), María Esther Aguilar Cansimbe (2009) and Ramón Ángeles Zalpa (2010) are the other missing journalists from that southern state of Mexico, RSF reported.
"My husband and I are the owners of the channel, we had advertising agreements with the municipality of Múgica, to spread the work that all the administrations have the obligation of making known to the public, and we gave up on it under the pressure we received," Urtiz Martínez said, according to Animal Político.
While she was investigating her husband’s disappearance, Urtiz Martínez suffered a heart attack in the delegation of the Attorney General's Office (PGR for its acronym in Spanish), on June 12, newspaper La Jornada reported. The wife of the missing journalist had to be admitted to the Women's Hospital in Morelia.
Previously, Urtiz Martínez also participated in the collective criminal complaint that nearly 100 journalists presented on May 31 before the Specialized Unit to Combat Kidnapping of the State Attorney General's Office (PGJE), for the abduction of Adame Pardo, Animal Político reported.
In the complaint, journalists demanded from the authorities that the course of the investigations for the disappearance of their colleague come from his work as a journalist. They also urged the authorities to recognize them as indirect victims in the process of investigating the disappearance of Adame – which has not had any progress so far – according to El Universal.
Additionally, in the document submitted to the attorney general's office, journalists said that last year, Adame Pardo and Urtiz Martínez were cowardly beaten by the Municipal Police during a citizen protest. This happened while both communicators were covering the takeover of the mayor’s office in Múgica by demonstrators, Animal Político said.
According to the union of Michoacan journalists, Adame Pardo received threats from his reports on that event, so he counted on the mechanism for protection of journalists implemented by the freedom of expression organization Article 19.
According to Animal Politician, Michoacan prosecutor José Martén Godoy said that the disappearance of Adame Pardo could also be a sentimental issue or due to debts with third parties.
Regarding the statements made by the prosecutor, Patricia Monreal, a journalist from the site Revolution 3.0 and a spokeswoman for the Michoacan journalists' movement, told site Noventa Grados that her guild will not allow authorities to divert the course of the investigation into the disappearance of Adame Pardo to focus on matters “of passion.”
So far in 2017, six journalists have been killed in Mexico. Their deaths remain unpunished.
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.
