Five Journalists Were Shot in One Day in Mexico, Officials Confirm The Associated Press
go to original December 1, 2023

A journalist places a banner during a protest demanding justice after the murder of photojournalist Ismael Villagomez Tapia, who was shot dead in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico November 17, 2023. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)

Mexico’s president said that two of four news photographers who were shot this week are in serious condition, as prosecutors confirmed that a fifth journalist was shot and wounded the same day.

The four photojournalists were shot near a military barracks in the southern Guerrero state after they returned from a crime scene. They had been covering one of the many homicides that occur on a near-daily basis in the violence-wracked city of Chilpancingo.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said “we must regret this,” referring to the shooting, but did not offer any information on a possible motive in the attack.

Another shooting in the neighboring state of Michoacan wounded reporter Maynor Ramón Ramírez, bringing the number of victims to five and marking one of the largest one-day tolls of media workers in a decade.

The shootings and abductions on Tuesday mark some of the largest mass attacks on reporters in one place in Mexico since one day in early 2012, when the bodies of three news photographers were found dumped in plastic bags in a canal in the Gulf coast city of Veracruz. Those killings were blamed on the once-powerful Zetas drug cartel.

In the past five years alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists documented the killings of at least 54 journalists in Mexico.

Read the rest at El País

Related: Article 19 Condemns Aggressions Against Journalists in Puerto Vallarta (Vallarta Independiente)

Related: The Bodies of 5 University Students Are Found in a Car in a Violence-Wracked City in Mexico (Associated Press)

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