Mexican journalist gunned down in Tijuana, second murder of reporter in one week
A Mexican journalist was fatally shot Sunday in Tijuana, the second time a journalist was killed in the city in seven days.
Lourdes Maldonado López personally told President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2019 that she feared for her life as a journalist. She was found shot death inside a car Sunday night.
In April 2021, Maldonado’s car was shot up, and she was offered protection through a government program designed to give journalists access to panic buttons and safe houses.
Maldonado joined the program, but she was not the first person to be killed under its watch. Ten people who took the protection have been murdered in the past five years, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Maldonado covered corruption and politics in Tijuana. She was also involved in a nine-year fight with a previous employer over back pay. That employer, Jaime Bonilla, was governor of Baja California between 2019 and 2021 and is a member of López Obrador’s party.
Shortly before her death, Maldonado announced that she’d won her case.
López Obrador promised an investigation into Maldonado’s killing and said, “You can’t automatically tie a labor lawsuit to a crime. It’s not responsible to rush to judgment, you have to wait.”
But an estimated 95% of journalist murders in Mexico never make it to trial. Another reporter, crime photographer Margarito Martinez, was shot dead outside his home in Tijuana on Jan. 17.
Maldonado spoke Jan. 21 at a vigil in his honor and was killed two days later, the Los Angeles Times reported. Baja California’s new governor, Marina del Pilar Ávila Olmeda, appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the killings of Martinez and Maldonado.
But police have not announced any progress in either case. Nothing suggests the two killings were connected, and the two journalists worked for different outlets. Almost 2,000 people were killed in Tijuana in 2021; estimates place it between the most dangerous and fifth-most dangerous city in the world.
Mexico is one of the deadliest countries in the world for journalists, according to multiple human rights groups. More than 40 journalists in the country have been killed or disappeared in the past three years. Maldonado was the third reporter killed in January alone, following the deaths of Martinez and José Luis Gamboa, who was stabbed to death in Veracruz on Jan. 10.
With News Wire Services
