Mexican Journalists Lose a 'Formidable Advocate' with Death of Mike O'Connor Matthew Bell - PRI's The World
go to original January 3, 2014

Mike O'Connor, former reporter and advocate for journalists, dies at 67. (CBS2)

Mike O'Connor grew up on the US-Mexico border. He spent most of his journalism career working in conflict zones — Central America, the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia — and then he brought that experience back to that same part of the world in 2009, when O'Connor took over as the Mexico City representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

O'Connor died of a heart attack on Sunday night. He was 67.

"Mexican journalists have lost one of their most formidable advocates," wrote Carlos Lauria, Senior Americas Program Coordinator for the CPJ based in New York.

"Mike was an outstanding investigative reporter, documenting the dozens of cases of journalists who have been killed, disappeared, and brutally attacked with total impunity in Mexico in the last few years," Lauria said.

O'Connor stayed in touch with his Mexican colleagues by meeting with them in person and spending countless hours speaking with them by phone, "trying to bring comfort to people who have been threatened with death," Lauria said.

These are people whose family members have been threatened or attacked, Lauria added, people whose places of work have been bombed. O'Connor, he said, "became a formidable advocate and he will be dearly missed in Mexico."

Lauria said more than 50 journalists have been killed or disappeared in Mexico over the last six years.

Read the rest at PRI's The World

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