MEXICO CITY (AP) - A Mexican television journalist has been shot to death in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, Texas, prosecutors reported Friday.
Prosecutors in Chihuahua state said journalist Arturo Alba Medina was found shot to death on a street late Thursday. They said at least two assailants were involved in the attack and pledged to bring the killers to justice.
“The commitment of the state government and the orders from the governor are to use all available resources to solve this situation,” said state Attorney General César Peniche Espejel.
Prosecutors said Alba Medina worked as a TV anchor and served as spokesman for a local college, the Instituto Tecnológico of Ciudad Juárez. Local media said he hosted the Telediario news show on Multimedios Televisión, and had reported on crime and violence.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, or CPJ, condemned the “brutal killing” and called on authorities to conduct “an immediate and transparent investigation” of the killing.
At least seven journalists have been killed in Mexico so far this year; the CPJ said that four, and perhaps five, were killed because of their work.
The violence has hit Chihuahua particularly hard. The newspaper La Verdad de Juárez reported that over the last 20 years, six journalists have been killed in Ciudad Juárez and a total of 23 state-wide during that period. Relatively few of those crimes have been punished. Those convicted were largely triggermen rather than the masterminds of the killings.
In a report this week, the CPJ wrote that “some recent convictions in the cases of journalists murdered in Mexico may give the impression that the state is making significant progress in the fight against impunity.”
“While CPJ has welcomed the convictions as an important step, the outlook for breaking the cycle of impunity and violence in Mexico has grown dimmer under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador,” according to the report.
It said a federal prosecutors’ office created a decade ago to investigate crimes against journalists “has, under López Obrador, shied away from proactively prosecuting murder cases,” and federal prosecutors have not taken over a single case of a murdered journalist since López Obrador took office in December 2018.
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