Tepic, Nayarit. After another murder of a journalist in Mexico, associations and institutions protested against the violence against media workers.
His body was found on July 8 near the capital of Tepic, Nayarit state, after Cecilia López Aguilar, wife of journalist Luis Martín Sánchez Iñiguez, reported him missing. The 59-year-old was a long-time employee at Crítica Digital Noticias and has been a correspondent for La Jornada, one of Mexico’s most important daily newspapers, for two years.
Sánchez is one of three media workers kidnapped in Nayarit state in recent days. Unlike Sánchez, Osiris Maldonado de la Paz and Jonathan Lora Ramírez were found alive.
Local prosecutors said the cases of the La Jornada correspondent and the two kidnapped communicators are related because their investigations show they “collaborated on joint projects related to their profession as well as personal matters.” In addition to his press card, his computer and a hard drive were also stolen.
Various journalist associations expressed their horror at the new acts of violence against their profession. The murder of Sánchez Íñiguez is the sixth bloody killing against a reporter in Mexico this year. Media workers organized rallies in different cities, except in Nayarit itself, for security reasons, according to journalist Temoris Grecko on Twitter writes: “Our comrades from Nayarit cannot demonstrate due to this situation. We will in CDMX [Mexiko-Stadt]Guadalajara and Oaxaca too”
International bodies such as the United Nations and the European embassies in Mexico once again expressed their protest against the violence. “The death of Mr. Sánchez Íñiguez makes it clear that many journalists in Mexico are subjected to violence and intimidation, which poses a threat to human rights,” emphasize the EU representation and the embassies of Norway and Switzerland in their joint statement.
The local human rights office of the United Nations High Commissioner demands the authorities to work together in a coordinated manner “to take the necessary measures to protect journalists in Nayarit and to conduct a prompt, thorough, independent and effective investigation in order to fully clarify the matter and punish all those responsible”.
According to a Unesco report, the number of journalists murdered worldwide rose to 86 in 2022, of which more than half (44) were in Latin America and 19 in Mexico alone.
Sánchez is also the third La Jornada correspondent to be killed in connection with his reporting, following Miroslava Breach Velducea in Chihuahua in 2015 and Javier Valdez Cárdenas in Sinaloa in May this year.