Journalist shot dead in Mexico, 15th media person to die so far this year

A journalist who ran an online local news programme was shot to death in southern Mexico, making him the 15th media worker killed so far this year nationwide.

Prosecutors in the southern state of Guerrero said on Monday that Fredid Romn was gunned down in the state capital, Chilpancingo.

Romn’s programme, The Reality of Guerrero, focused heavily on state-level politics. He also wrote a column.

Guerrero is a state where drug gangs, armed vigilantes and other groups regularly clash.

2022 has been one of the deadliest ever for journalists in Mexico, which is now considered the most dangerous country for reporters outside a war zone.

Prosecutors did not immediately offer any further details on the killing of Romn, who local media said had previously published a newspaper under the same name and was shot inside his vehicle.

The killing comes just one week after independent journalist Juan Arjn Lpez was found dead in the northern border state of Sonora. Prosecutors said he died from a blow to the head. His body was found in San Luis Rio Colorado, across the border from Yuma, Arizona.

That area has been hit by drug cartel violence in recent years. In March, volunteer searchers found 11 bodies in clandestine burial pits in a stretch of desert near a garbage dump in San Luis.

At the beginning of August, a journalist was among four people killed inside a beer shop in the central Mexico state of Guanajuato.

Authorities said it was unknown whether that attack was related to the journalist’s work, his role as representative of local businesses in the planning of an upcoming fair or something else.

While organised crime is often involved in journalist killings, small town officials or politicians with political or criminal motivations are often suspects as well. Journalists running small news outlets in Mexico’s interior are easy targets.

Jan-Albert Hootsen, the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote after Arjn Lpez’s killing that although some arrests have been made in earlier cases of press killings this year, an ongoing climate of impunity continues to fuel these attacks”.

(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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