3 Journalists Suspected Killed On Job In Mexico In 2013, Says Committee To Protect Journalists

The Associated Press wrote on Monday that a new report by the Committee To Protect Journalists says that of the 70 journalists around the world who were confirmed to have been killed in 2013 because of their work, none were killed in Mexico, for the first time in a decade. But it’s not all sunny for Mexican journalists: of the 25 other journalists worldwide whose deaths CPJ says it’s investigating based on suspicions that they could have been tied to the victims’ line of work, three of them occurred in Mexico.

The CPJ refers to the death of Alberto López Bello, a journalist for El Imparcial and Radiorama in the city of Oaxaca who was beaten and shot to death on July 17 along with another man identified in reports as an undercover police informant. Local journalists told the organization that López had recently published a series of stories about drug sales in Oaxaca City. Another late April victim, Daniel Alejandro Martínez Balzaldúa, was a 22-year-old reporter for Vanguardia who’d recently been hired to cover society – a beat targeted by organized crime in the past for inadvertently snapping images of cartel members, the CPJ writes. The third and final, Jaime Guadalupe González Domínguez, was killed at a taco stand near the border with Texas for motives which are largely unknown, though he had previously received threats, and his murderer also stole his camera.

The Committee ranked Mexico No. 7 in the world this past May on its Impunity Index of 12 countries where at least five journalists were murdered – with no convictions resulting from it – in the years 2003-2012. The organization wrote that while journalist murders had been in decline over the past three years, the drop was “due in part to the self-censorship that has taken hold in virtually every corner of the nation outside the capital”, and pointed to the May 2012 announcement by a Nuevo Laredo newspaper that it was halting cartel-related coverage.