Organised crime seems to have been responsible for the murders of two journalists on March 25 in Monterrey, in Mexico's northern state of Nuevo León – José Luis Cerda Meléndez, 33, a programme host on the national TV channel Televisa, and Luis Emanuel Ruíz Carrillo, 20, a reporter for La Prensa, a daily based in the neighbouring state of Coahuila, Paris-based press freedom group Reporters sans Frontières (RSF) has reported.
Ruíz had travelled to Monterrey the previous day to interview Cerda. After a meeting at Televisa-Monterrey headquarters on March 25, the two journalists were forced into car outside the TV station. A cousin of Ruíz who was accompanying them, Juan Roberto Gómez, was also abducted.
The bodies of Ruíz and Gómez were found the next day beside a freeway. The police found Cerda’s body on a Monterey street with the hands tied and a gunshot wound to the head. A written message found near the body said: “Stop cooperating with Los Zetas. Signed DCG. Greetings architect No. 1”
TV cameras were filming Cerda’s body when gunmen suddenly appeared, removed the body without being stopped by the police, and dumped it at the spot where Cerda had issued a call the previous day for a march for peace and against violence in Nuevo León. Sources close to Televisa told RSF that this kind of episode was not unprecedented in cases in which organised crime was involved and wanted to control the publicity.
This extraordinary development after the triple murder highlights the degree to which the drug cartels rule in this region of Mexico, where Televisa has been target of several armed attacks.
“Although the motive has not yet been established, these murders – coming after Noel López Olguín’s disappearance in Veracruz state at the start of the month – require the urgent implementation of the mechanisms for protecting journalists that the federal interior ministry adopted in November,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The resources deployed in the fight against impunity and to protect the media must be commensurate with the challenge.”
