Suspects identified in journalist's murder in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican authorities announced Tuesday the identification of two of the three people who had participated in the murder of a journalist who registered last week in the west of the country. Armando Linares became the eighth murdered so far this year, which has been considered the most violent in decades for the local press.

The Michoacán State Prosecutor, Adrián López Solis, told a press conference that Magdiel Urbina Chimal and Carlos Sánchez Mendoza were identified as the alleged perpetrators of the murder of Linares, director of the news portal Monitor Michoacán, which took place on March 15 in the town of Zitácuaro.

López Solis pointed out that a judge ordered the arrest of the two alleged attackers and a reward of 100,000 pesos (about $5,000) was offered for each one, for information allowing their location and detention.

Without specifying names, the prosecutor said that one of the alleged attackers was talking to Linares and some time later came to his home, located in the northeast of Zitácuaro, and shot the journalist, who died at the entrance of his house. In addition, two men, who were riding motorcycles, were seen on the day of the murder walking around the communicator's house supposedly to locate the home, the prosecutor added.

López Solis said that a set of possible motives for the Linares homicide is being handled, and indicated that his case could be related to the death of Roberto Toledo, collaborator, camera operator and video editor of Monitor Michoacán. Toledo was shot dead several times on the afternoon of January 31 by three gunmen who showed up at the office of lawyer Joel Vera, deputy director of the portal, where the media also operated.

Monitor Michoacán spent four years reporting community information from Zitácuaro, murders, allegations of corruption and illegal logging, and cases of peasant communities in the area fighting for their autonomy.

On the day of the Toledo homicide, the director of Monitor Michoacán denounced, in a video he shared on the portal's Facebook account, that “showing corruption of corrupt governments, corrupt officials and governments led us to the death today of one of our colleagues”, without feeling that six weeks later he would run with the same fate.

At the time, Linares told The Associated Press that he had received threats for some time and that even after the murder of his collaborator, the threats had continued. After Toledo's death, the authorities activated the protection mechanism for the director of Monitor Michoacán and assigned him national guards for custody.

A person familiar with the case told the PA that Linares was unable to remain under the federal protection mechanism because he did not want to leave his native Zitácuaro, as two other employees of the portal did after the Toledo murder, claiming that he did not want to leave his family and friends, or the community where he grew up. “Armando said that the people would protect him,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to put his life at risk.

The director of Monitor Michoacán chose to stay away from journalistic activity for a while and even changed his phone number. In February, the journalist resumed work and began reporting and broadcasting from the streets due to the fact that the media office was closed after the collaborator's death.

In early March, gunmen murdered Juan Carlos Muñiz, a police information reporter for the news portal Witness Minero, in the state of Zacatecas.

At the end of February, Jorge Camero, director of a news portal, was shot and until a few days before his death he was also the private secretary of a mayor of the northern state of Sonora. Heber López, director of the Web News portal, was also assassinated that month in the state of Oaxaca, in the south of the country.

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.

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%.