The Colombian National Police is being accused of potentially being responsible for two separate attacks on press freedom on Oct. 8.
Mexican photojournalist Edgar Daniel Esqueda Castro was found dead on Oct. 6 in San Luis Potosi in central Mexico, a day after being kidnapped by men who allegedly identified themselves as police officers.
“It’s been 17 years of this red accounting (cuenta roja) in which we have not stopped counting the number of journalists killed. There are 109, and a good part of them in the last two administrations,” said Daniela Pastrana, director of Mexican journalists organization Periodistas de a Pie. “But the counting began, paradoxically, with the start of the democratic transition. That is one of the things that I still cannot explain.”
The press in Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, no longer conducts investigative journalism following the death of Javier Valdez, a journalist from the Sinaloan weekly newspaper Ríodoce, who was killed on May 15 of this year.
Hitmen on motorcycles shot and killed journalist Carlos Williams Flores in the town of Tegucigalpita, Honduras on the afternoon of Sept 13.
A Brazilian mayor in the state of Minas Gerais has been arrested and accused of being involved in the 2016 death of journalist Maurício Campos Rosa.
Juan Camilo Ortiz was sentenced to 47 years, six months and two days in prison for murdering 31-year-old Colombian journalist Flor Alba Núñez Vargas, El Colombiano reported.
Juan Carlos Hernández Ríos, 29, was shot dead upon arriving at his home on the night of Sept. 5 in the Mexican state of Guanajuato. The killers were two unknown men who, according to the neighbors, had been waiting for him for hours. Hernández died in the hospital, reported Mexican site Sin Embargo.
During a two-day public hearing, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights based in Costa Rica heard the case against the Colombian State for the murder of journalist Nelson Carvajal Carvajal on April 16, 1998.
Mexican journalist Cándido Ríos Vázquez was killed in southern Veracruz on Aug. 22, 2017 despite being under the federal government program to protect journalists.
The first person has been found guilty for the murder of Colombian journalist Flor Alba Núñez who was killed in September 2015 while entering her workplace.
Daniel Urresti, former general and former Minister of the Interior during the government of Peruvian President Ollanta Humala, was accused by prosecutor Luis Landa of being the co-author of the 1988 murder of journalist Hugo Bustíos. The prosecutor made this declaration during the current trial against Urresti and asked for 25 years in prison for the former general, newspaper La República reported.