A Mexican journalist was murdered in the southern state of Chiapas on Friday, authorities and his employer said, the latest attack against the press in one of the world’s most dangerous countries for media workers.
Mario Gomez, a reporter with El Heraldo de Chiapas, is the latest victim in a wave of violence against the press in Mexico, the second-deadliest country in the world for journalists after war-torn Syria, according to the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders.
“He had recently filed a complaint because he was receiving threats,” a colleague at the paper told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Gomez, 35, had also been threatened in 2016 for publishing articles on corruption by two state officials, according to the media rights group Article 19.
El Heraldo said Gomez, a general news correspondent in the town of Yajalon, was leaving his house to go to work when two unidentified men arrived and “murdered him in cold blood” with a series of shots to the abdomen at point-blank range.
Gomez was taken to the hospital but died of his wounds, said the paper, where he had worked for the past eight years.
“We call for an exhaustive investigation to find those responsible for this crime,” his colleagues wrote in an editorial published on the newspaper’s website.
The state prosecutor’s office said in a statement it would “follow all lines of investigation to shed light on this reprehensible crime and bring those responsible to justice.”
