8th journalist murdered in Mexico so far this year

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Journalist Armando Linares was shot and killed on Tuesday in a town in western Mexico, becoming the eighth journalist to be killed in a year that has been considered the most violent in decades for the Mexican press.

Linares, director of the news portal Monitor Michoacán, was shot dead in the town of Zitácuaro, in the state of Michoacán. The journalist's death was confirmed to the PA by the spokeswoman for the Michoacán Prosecutor's Office, who specified that the agency has already started the corresponding investigations.

Linares was killed less than two months after the murder of a Monitor Michoacán employee, Roberto Toledo, who was shot on January 31 also in Zitácuaro. At the time, Linares told the PA that he had received several death threats and that he had protection from the police forces after entering the federal protection mechanism.

Earlier this month, gunmen murdered Juan Carlos Muñiz, a police information reporter for the news portal Witness Minero, in the state of Zacatecas.

Muñiz's murder occurred a few days after the shooting death of Jorge Camero, director of a news portal and who until a few days before his death was also the private secretary of a mayor of the state of Sonora, bordering the United States. In February, the murder of Heber López, director of the Web News portal, was also recorded in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Toledo, camera operator and video editor ofMonitor Michoacán, was shot while preparing for an interview. Days earlier, on January 23, reporter Lourdes Maldonado López was killed inside her car in the border city of Tijuana, where photographer Margarito Martinez had been shot less than a week ago. Reporter José Luis Gamboa was killed on January 10 in the state of Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken expressed concern in February about the murders of reporters in Mexico, prompting President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to claim that the senior official was uninformed. López Obrador seemed to take the comment as a criticism of Mexico's efforts to investigate these crimes and protect journalists.

Mexico is the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere for the practice of journalism, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an activist media protection agency based in New York. According to their data, nine journalists were killed in 2021 in the country.

The difficulty of clarifying the killings of reporters and activists is a serious problem in Mexico, as acknowledged by the Undersecretary for Human Rights, Population and Migration of the Ministry of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, who in December admitted that impunity in such cases exceeds 90%.