On Tuesday, the body of newspaper reporter Noel López Olguín was unearthed in the city of Chinameca, Veracruz, after the head of a drug gang confessed to killing the journalist. Family members positively identified his body on Wednesday.
Lopez, who disappeared in March, worked for La Verdad de Jaltipan and focused on the activities of the drug cartels and government corruption.
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 12 journalists, including López, have been murdered in Mexico, in the last 18 months alone.
According to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, since 2000, more than 50 journalists have been murdered in Mexico. Of course, just as some 34,000 Mexicans have been killed in that country’s ongoing drug war, these reporters have fallen victim to that country’s drug cartels.
In January 2009, the CPJ released the following statement: “Drug traffickers are clearly using the media to spread a message of fear and terror and to make clear to everyone that there will be consequences to reporting on their activities. The government cannot allow criminals to intimidate the media into silence.”
The CPJ rates Mexico in the top 10 of unsolved murders of journalists. Mexico is tied with Afghanistan for the number of cases of murdered reporters which have yet to be solved. Mexico is actually ahead of Somalia in that deadly category.
What follows is a list of Mexican journalists killed in 2010:
-Carlos Alberto Guajardo Romero, 37, was killed on November 5th in a crossfire between the Mexican military and drug traffickers in Matamoros. Romero was a crime reporter with the daily newspaper Expreso Matamoros.
-Luis Carlos Santiago, 21, was shot to death on September 16th in a Juarez parking lot by as yet, unidentified gunmen. Santiago was a photographer with the local daily El Diario.
-Valentin Valdés Espinosa, 29, a reporter for the newspaper Zocalo de Saltillo was kidnapped on January 8th in downtown Saltillo.
The next morning, Valdés' body was found in front of the local Motel Marbella. He had been shot several times, his arms and legs had been bound, and his body showed obvious signs evidence of torture. A message found next to his body read: "This is going to happen to those who don't understand. The message is for everyone."
Valdes’ colleagues believe his murder was in retaliation for an article he had written about a leader of the notoriously violent Zetas cartel.
Though throughout the year, ten journalists were killed because of their coverage of the cartels, violence against reporters in 2010 was actually down in Mexico as compared to recent years.
On November 13, 2008, newspaper reporter Armando Rodriguez was murdered outside of his home, as he was leaving to drive his eight year old daughter to school.
Rodriguez was a crime reporter for El Diario, the largest newspaper in Ciudad Juarez. That city which is just across the border from El Paso, TX, saw more than 1,500 murders in 2008.
Editor of El Diario, Pedro Torres said that a few months earlier, Rodriguez had received a threatening message on his cell phone to “tone it down.” The day before his murder, Rodriguez reported on the murder of two local police officers.
One night in January 2007, veteran crime reporter Rodolfo Rincon, left his office at the Tabasco Hoy newspaper, and was never seen again. That same day, his two-page report on drug activities in the state of Tabasco had appeared in the paper.
Rincon, 54, is believed to have been kidnapped and killed, by the drug traffickers on whom he regularly reported.
In April 5, 2005, crime reporter Guadalupe Garcia Escamilla, 39, was approached by a man as she parked her car outside her radio station in Nuevo Laredo. The man shot Escamilla 14 times. She died in the hospital, a week and a half later. She was the host of the show known as "Punto Rojo.“
The shooting took place only a half an hour after the station ran a report by Escamilla detailing the murder of a Nuevo Laredo defense attorney.
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