With the Mexican press still reeling from the recent disappearance of one journalist and the appearance in a hidden grave of the body of another journalist, now local media are reporting the June 14 killing of reporter Pablo Ruelas Barraza in Huatabampo, in the northern Mexican state of Sonora.
U.S. newspapers should do a much better job covering drug trafficking in their own cities, charged a Mexican editor who argues the drug cartels love nothing better than to limit coverage of their deadly activities.
The wave of violence against journalists in Mexico appears to have no end. Even as Mexican media outlets on June 9 reported the kidnapping of journalist Marco Antonio López Ortiz, information chief for the newspaper Novedades Acapulco in the state of Veracruz, journalists remained on alert because of the beating journalist Carlos de Jesús Rodríguez, director of the news site Gobernantes.com, suffered while in jail.
A group of demonstrators threatened and beat three Mexican journalists from the newspaper Noticias, Voz e Imagen de Oaxaca after invading the newspaper's offices in the city of Oaxaca, in Southeastern Mexico, and painting the newspaper's facade with anti-press slogans, reported the National Center of Social Communication (CENCOS).
Nearly 70 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000 and the the Mexican government is “complicit” in the crimes against media workers, according to a new report by PEN Canada and the International Human Rights Program (IHRP) at the University of Toronto, the Toronto Star reports.
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) released its annual Impunity Index, which ranks three Latin American countries among those where killers of journalist regularly escape justice, The Associated Press reports.
The Mexican police found the body of journalist Noel López Olguín in a clandestine grave in Chinameca, Veracruz, The Associated Press and Milenio report. The journalist disappeared March 8, presumably kidnapped by drug traffickers.
A grenade was launched against the offices of the newspaper Vanguardia, in Saltillo, in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila. No one was injured, but the newspaper suffered material damages, according to CNN México.
The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) is urging Mexican President Felipe Calderón to renew investigative efforts into the 2008 killing of journalist Armando Rodríguez, IAPA said in a press release May 26.
Alleged members of Los Zetas, one of Mexico’s biggest criminal organizations, were arrested while posting a banner threatening the press in the western Guatemalan city of Quetzaltenango, Observador Global reports.
An unidentified cameraman for a local broadcaster in the northern Mexican state of Durango was filming a May 23 car accident when he was shot three times by gunmen who attacked police responding to the incident, Milenio reports.
The Mexican authorities have released journalist Jesús Lemus Barajas, the founder of El Tiempo newspaper, who had been held for three years on charges of having ties to the drug trafficking cartels he was investigating for the paper, EFE reports.