Last week, a bullet-ridden body was found in a garbage dump on the outskirts of Lázaro Cárdenas, a city in the western state of Michoacán in Mexico. It belonged to Miguel Ángel Villagómez Valle, the editor of a Michoacán newspaper. He was last seen leaving the office a day earlier, on 9 October.
Villagómez's paper, "Noticias de Michoacán", covers extensively the issues of drug trafficking, corruption and organised crime - prime reasons to make him a target. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a month before his death, he told his family that he had received a threatening call from the Zetas, former soldiers who worked for the powerful Gulf drug cartel. He warned his family to be alert.
Sadly, his case is just the latest in a series of abductions, disappearances and murders of journalists in the past year in Mexico, now one of the most dangerous countries in the Americas for journalists and media professionals, even surpassing Colombia. During the past eight years, at least 24 journalists and media workers have been killed, eight remain missing and dozens more have been threatened, says ARTICLE 19-Mexico.
According to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), Villagómez wasn't the only journalist murdered that day. David García Monroy, a freelancer who worked with the newspapers "La Jornada" and "El Diario de Chihuahua", was one of 11 people killed when professional killers burst into the bar where he was drinking in the northern city of Chihuahua and opened fire.
"These latest murders demonstrate just how urgent is the need to challenge impunity, find the killers and bring them to justice," said IFJ.
Impunity for press crimes constitutes one of the most alarming characteristics of the overall human rights situation in Mexico. Mexico ranks 10th in CPJ's Impunity Index, a list of countries where journalists are slain on a recurring basis and governments consistently fail to solve the crimes.
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