Police journalist Alejandro Martínez Noguez, who was covered by state protection after being shot dead in an attack, was shot dead Sunday in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato, authorities said.
Martínez Noguez, known as “El Llanero,” was the administrator of a popular news page on social media. The journalist was shot dead by unknown assailants while he was traveling in a car with his bodyguards after carrying out journalistic work, reported the Security Secretariat of the city of Celaya.
“Armed civilians traveling in a pickup truck caught up with them and fired their long weapons at the vehicle assigned by the municipality to transport and escort the reporter,” the agency said in a statement.
Police sources told AFP that the police officers, belonging to the local traffic division, repelled the attack. However, one of the bullets hit Martínez Noguez, who was travelling in the back seat, in the head.
After the attack, the police officer who was driving immediately went to a local hospital, where the journalist was treated, but he eventually died.
“The Ministry of Security strongly condemns the attack against journalists and communicators and will help to clarify this unfortunate incident,” the statement added.
A woman who was traveling in another car at the time of the attack on Martinez was also injured in the shooting, police sources said.
I was at risk
In 2022, Martínez was the victim of an attack and since then had been permanently guarded by municipal police officers, assigned to that task at the request of the federal mechanism that the Mexican State has to protect threatened journalists, a state government source confirmed to AFP.
“He was a journalist who was at risk (…). He was well known in Celaya, he was a colleague who had been working for many years,” Balbina Flores, representative in Mexico of the advocacy organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF), told AFP about Martinez’s case.
His last report, a video of a road accident lasting about 20 minutes, was posted on his Facebook page “El Hijo del Llanero Solititito” shortly before his murder. The site has about 343,000 followers.
Mexico, hit hard by violence from organized crime, is considered one of the most dangerous countries for journalism, according to various organizations.
In mid-July, Federico Hans, a journalist from the town of Caborca in the northern state of Sonora, was shot and wounded as he got into his vehicle outside his home.
On June 29, Victor Culebro, the director of a news page on Facebook, was found dead on a highway in the state of Chiapas (south).
An RSF tally indicates that more than 150 reporters have been killed in the country since 1994.