The eighth journalist killed in Mexico until this year

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

Linares, director of the news portal monitor Michoacán, was shot in the town of Chitacuaro, in the state of Michoacán. The death of the reporter was confirmed to PA by a spokesman for the Prosecutor's Office of Michoacan, who stated that the agency had already begun the corresponding investigation.

Linares died less than two months after the murder of Roberto Toledo, a monitor Michoacan employee who was shot in Zitaquaro on January 31. At that time, Linares said he received several death threats to the PA and received protection from the police after entering the federal protection mechanism.

Earlier this month, a gunman killed Juan Carlos Muniz, police intelligence reporter for the news portal Witness Minero in the state of Zacatecas.

The murder of Muñiz occurred a few days after Jorge Camero, the head of the news portal, died in a shooting, and until a few days before his death, he was the personal secretary of the mayor of the state of Sonora, bordering the United States. In February, the murder of Heber López, the head of the web news portal, was also recorded in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Toledo, the camera operator and video editor of Monitor Michoacán, was shot while preparing for the interview.A few days ago, on January 23, journalist Lourdes Maldonado Lopez died in a car in the border city of Tijuana. Photographer Margarito Martinez was shot a week ago. Journalist José Luis Gamboa died on January 10 in the state of Veracruz, in the Gulf of Mexico.

US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken expressed concern about the murder of a journalist in Mexico in February, claiming that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had not been informed by senior officials. López Obrador seemed to be commenting with criticism about Mexico's efforts to investigate these crimes and protect journalists.

According to the Committee for the Protection of Journalists, an activist media protection agency based in New York, Mexico is the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere when it comes to journalism practice.According to their data, 9 journalists died across the country in 2021.

The difficulty in clarifying the murder of journalists and activists is a serious problem in Mexico, as admitted in December by the Deputy Minister of Human Rights, Population and Migration of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Alejandro Encinas, who admitted that the punishment in such cases exceeds 90%.