Mexican journalist Lourdes Maldonado was murdered this Sunday in Tijuana, making her the second journalist to be murdered in a week in this city bordering California, and the third in the entire country so far in 2022.
According to the first police reports,
Maldonado was shot
after 6:40 pm when she arrived at her home in the Santa Fe neighborhood in a sedan-type vehicle.
Neighbors of the journalist first reported a roar of rockets, but when they left they found the communicator wounded by a bullet in the pilot's seat, so they called the authorities.
The first to arrive at the scene of the crime were elements of the municipal police and later paramedics from the Mexican Red Cross, who declared Maldonado dead.
Elements of the National Guard also arrived to protect the area.
Lourdes Maldonado belonged to the Protection Program for Journalists in Baja California, but the surveillance provided to her was not permanent.
He entered said program for
fear of a legal problem he had with former Governor Jaime Bonilla,
of the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party.
State police guard the house of the murdered journalist Lourdes Maldonado, in the Santa Fe subdivision in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.Joebeth Terriquez / EFE
In March 2019, Maldonado attended the daily conference of the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in Mexico City, where
he denounced that his life was in danger
in the middle of the lawsuit with Bonilla, then a licensed senator.
"I also come here to ask for support, help and labor justice, because I even fear for my life,
because it is a lawsuit that I have had with him for six years," he told the president.
Maldonado had worked for various media, local and national, and was recently doing an internet, radio and television program called
Brebaje
, focused on local news.
[Murdered a journalist who wrote about crime in Mexico, the most dangerous country in America for reporters]
Last Thursday, Maldonado had made public his victory over the labor lawsuit filed against the company Primer Sistema de Noticias (PSN) owned by former Governor Bonilla.
On that occasion the journalist accused him of being corrupt.
“He is a tax evader, a corrupt man, he has to come to pay the Board, it is not convenient for him to have a journalist investigate his accounts on PSN,” he said that day.
"They can put him in jail for tax evasion," he added.
"The man is a tax evader who has never paid taxes," he
stressed.
"They hope the vaccine will kill me."
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This is the second journalist to be murdered in Tijuana so far this year, after photojournalist Margarito Martínez, who was shot at on January 17 as he was getting into his car at his home in the Camino Verde neighborhood.
In addition, on January 10, journalist José Luis Gamboa Arenas, director of the digital media Inforegio, where he disseminated problems of insecurity and politics, was assassinated in Veracruz.
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On Saturday, Maldonado had taken the microphone to express his condolences for Martínez's death, at a vigil held by organized journalists at the Monument to Mexico in Tijuana.
According to the organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), at least seven journalists were murdered in Mexico in 2021, making it
"the deadliest in the world for the press
.
"
Mexico ranks 143rd out of 180 countries in the organization's 2021 World Press Freedom Index.
With information from EFE, AP and
Reforma
.
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