A photographer from the newspaper El Diario de Juárez was shot to death Thursday, Sept. 16, in a mall parking lot in Ciudad Juarez, ground zero for the drug trafficking violence in Mexico and just along the border with the United States, according to CNN. Another photographer, an intern at the newspaper, was seriously injured in the shoooting, according to the Associated Press.
El Diario identified the victim as Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco, 21 years old. La Jornada said that Santiago "was identified by his own colleagues who had come to cover the news" of the shooting.
The attack occurred just blocks from the newspaper, when an armed group that La Jornada identified as "hitmen" fired pistols and rifles, reported ABC. The assistant editor of the newspaper, Pedro Torres, was quoted by the BBC as saying the attack was not just against the newspaper, but was an attack against journalism in general.
This is not the first time reporters from El Diario de Juárez have been attacked. AFP reported that in 2008, the veteran police-beat journalist Armando Rodríguez was killed by an armed group. His killing remains unpunished.
Recently, a report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) said that 22 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2006.
According to official statistics, violence from organized crime in Mexico has taken the lives of 28,000 people in confrontations between rival cartels and attacks against authorities, officials and journalists.
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.
