Martín López, a journalist and host at Canal 44 in Ciudad Juárez, has joined the ranks of media workers who have sought asylum in the U.S. border city of El Paso, after receiving threats from drug traffickers.
Héctor Gordoa, one of four journalists who were kidnapped this week in Durango state, was dropped off at Televisa’s Torreón offices, where he worked, AFP and La Jornada report.
Two reporters and two cameramen were kidnapped from the city of Gómez Palacio in Durango state, where they were covering prisoner unrest, the Los Angeles Times reports. The inmates were protesting revelations that jail officials allegedly armed inmates and used them to carry out drug-related killings, BBC explains.
Just two days after four journalists were kidnapped in Durango state, Ulises González García was abducted from his home in the middle of the night, presumably to be held for ransom, La Jornada reports. The journalist is the director of the weekly paper La Opinión, based in Jerez, Zacatecas in north-central Mexico.
Journalists, public officials, and police chiefs in the northern border state of Chihuahua, one of the areas most effected by drug violence in recent years, are planning to create the country’s first "security protocol for journalists that cover risky areas," Devenir and Ahoramismo report.
At a time when journalists are targets of organized crime and violence against reporters goes largely unpunished, declaring an editorial war against corruption and drug trafficking seems suicidal. According to Prodavinci’s Oscar Medina, this is precisely the journey upon which the weekly Tijuana-based news magazine Zeta has embarked.
Over the first six months of this year, the region has passed Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, as the area with the most journalists killed, the International Press Institute announced in its Six-Month Death Watch report.
Ciudad Juárez is considered one of the most violent cities in the world but last week the city experienced, for the first time in history, a car bomb successfully attacking federal agents. Camerman Luis Hernández Núñez, from the television channel Telecinco, was injured as he recorded the moment of the explosion, reported El Universal.
La Jornada reports that both the Special Prosecutor for Attention to Crimes Against Freedom of Expression and the National Human Rights Commission (NCHR) are investigating the complaint of photojournalist Irineo Mujica Arzate, who is accusing agents of the National Institute of Migration (INM) of hitting him and stealing his equipment.
Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) will investigate military agression against three journalists who covered a police operation in Nuevo Laredo, in the state of Tamaulipas, reported El Universal.
The "bloodshed" continues, said Reporters Without Borders (RSF) after the killing in Mexico of Marco Aurelio Martínez Tijerina, in the state of Nuevo León, and Guillermo Alcaraz Trejo, of Chihuahua, in the northern part of the country. Their deaths bring the number of media workers killed in Mexico this year to at least 10, according to RSF.
The media suffering most from the killings of at least eight journalists this year in Mexico are those in the interior of the country who are essentially defenseless against the violence, reported the Inter Press Service (IPS).