MEXICO CITY --
One other journalist was attacked Wednesday in Mexico, the place three have been killed thus far this month.
Jose Ignacio Santiago stated he narrowly escaped when a automobile carrying armed assailants tried to chop his automobile off on a rural freeway within the southern state of Oaxaca.
Santiago stated he was capable of escape as a result of he was accompanied by two bodyguards assigned to him below a authorities program to guard journalists. Santiago had been assigned the guards after he was kidnapped by a gang in 2017.
The assault comes someday after press teams held greater than a dozen demonstrations all through Mexico Tuesday to protest the killings of three journalists because the begin of the yr.
Santiago stated the bodyguard driving him was capable of outmaneuver the attackers, however the assailants opened fireplace after they noticed the journalist's automobile escaping. Santiago, the director of a web-based information website, was not injured.
He had been taping video in a distant Triqui Indigenous space, and that will have angered one of many teams battling for management of the area.
"I do not assume I've any issues in that space, however they could not have appreciated seeing information media within the space," stated Santiago. "It's a Triqui space."
Some 10,000 Triquis dwell in distant, impoverished communities within the mountains of Oaxaca. Three Triqui teams are locked in a decades-long armed battle that has seen dozens of killings. In 2010, a Finnish human rights observer and a Mexican political activist had been shot to dying in the identical space.
Assaults on journalists have spiked this month.
Within the border metropolis of Tijuana, two journalists had been killed within the house of every week. On Jan. 17, crime photographer Margarito Martinez was gunned down exterior his residence. And on Jan. 23, reporter Lourdes Maldonado Lopez was discovered shot to dying inside her automobile.
On Jan. 10, reporter Jose Luis Gamboa was killed within the Gulf coast state of Veracruz.
Officers have acknowledged that greater than 90% of murders of journalists and rights defenders stay unresolved, regardless of a authorities system meant to guard them.
The New York-based Committee to Shield Journalists places the proportion at 95%, stated its Mexico consultant Jan-Albert Hootsen.
Laura Sanchez, a journalist from Baja California residing in Mexico Metropolis, ridiculed the federal government program that's supposed to guard journalists Tuesday. The federal government program typically provides journalists a button fob that may sound an emergency alarm, however some say it's ineffective.
"What they offer us is a damned panic button, and you already know what that button is? It's the variety of the municipal police supervisor who's corrupt and offered out," Sanchez stated.
Mexico stays probably the most harmful place within the Western Hemisphere for journalists. The federal government says 52 journalists or media employees have been slain in Mexico since December 2018.
It says seven of the 52 killed had been enrolled within the safety program.
Individuals and journalists be a part of a nationwide protest in opposition to the homicide of journalist Lourdes Maldonado and freelance photojournalist Margarito Martinez on the Mexico monument in Tijuana, Mexico, Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022. (AP Photograph/Marco Ugarte)
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