The director of an online media outlet was murdered Tuesday in Mexico, the latest journalist killed this year in a country long considered the most dangerous in the world for journalists.
Police in the western state of Michoacan said Armando Linares, who ran the Monitor Michoacan website, was shot to death at a house in the city of Zitacuaro. Linares’s death came just weeks after Roberto Toledo, his colleague at Monitor Michoacano, was shot and killed.
Michoacan state has long been plagued by turf wars between local drug gangs. The Associated Press says Linares had revealed he had received several death threats after enrolling in a government-run journalist protection program.
Among the journalists killed in Mexico this year are Lourdes Maldonado Lopez, a veteran journalist who covered corruption and politics for several news outlets, who was found shot to death outside her home in the northern city of Tijuana in January; photojournalist Margarito Martinez, who was shot and killed outside his home in Tijuana several days earlier; and Jose Luis Gamboa, the founder and editor of an online news outlet, who was killed January 10 in Veracruz state.
The murders prompted the European Parliament to pass a resolution last Thursday urging Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to end his verbal attacks on reporters and to ensure their safety.
President Lopez Obrador angrily lashed out in response the next day, denouncing the statement as “slanderous” and accusing the parliament of having a “colonialist mindset.”
