Only hours after a TV host was killed in northern Mexico, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reported the disappearance of another journalist in Mexico, where in the last four years violence linked to drug trafficking has exploded.
Noel López Olguín, a contributor to the local weeklies Horizonte and Noticias de Acayucán, and La Verdad newspaper, in Veracruz state, disappeared March 8 after receiving a phone call and advising that he was going to “sort out a problem” in Soteapan, in the south of the state, according to the director of the State Commissoin for Defense of Journalists, Gerardo Perdomo, quoted by RSF.
The web site Periodistas en Español, explained that “the main hypothesis claims that he was kidnapped by an armed group.” In late February, La Verdad reported the kidnapping of two of its journalists, who were freed after a few hours. In addition, two other reporters, Evaristo Ortega Zárate, editor of the weekly Espacio in Colipa, and Jesús Mejía Lechuga, an employee of radio MS-Noticias in Martínez de la Torre, disappeared in Veracruz in 2010 and 2003, respectively.
A new wave of threats and attacks on journalists began immediately after media signed a pact to unify criteria about the coverage of drug trafficking with the goal of preventing sensationalism in images and stories and to protect journalists. The newspaper El Sur of Acapulco received threats Friday against its editor. "This message is for Juan Angulo ... Tomorrow at 2 p.m., all the innocents (should) get out, get out,” a voice warned by phone before hanging up, Artículo 19 warmed.
The newspaper La Jornada de Guerrero reported Saturday as a precautionary measure that newspaper employees were not working in their offices. Last Nov. 10, an armed group invaded El Sur’s offices and fired inside the buildings. No one was injured.
Meanwhile, new details emerged about last week’s assassination of TV host José Luis Cerda in the northern state of Nuevo León. Cerda was killed along with a 20-year-old photographer, Luis Emmanuel Ruiz Carrillo, winner of the state prize for journalism in the northern state of Coahuila, who was filming a documentary about Cerda for his university thesis.
For more details about violence against journalists and media in Mexico, see this Knight Center map.
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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.
