Lourdes Maldonado belonged to the Protection Program for Journalists in Baja California, but the surveillance provided to her was not permanent.
The Journalist Lourdes Maldonado became this Sunday the second Mexican journalist murdered in a week in Tijuana, a city bordering California, and the third in all of Mexico in January alone.
According to the first police reports, it was after 6:40 p.m. (00:40 GMT) this Sunday when Lourdes Maldonado arrived at her home in the Santa Fe subdivision, inside the private Chalco, 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, for which they requested the presence of 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 was not permanent.
His entry into said program was due to fear of a legal problem he had with former Governor Jaime Bonilla, of the ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena).
He asked AMLO for help
Maldonado even attended the daily conference of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico City in March 2019, 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.
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.
She is the second journalist murdered in Tijuana in 2022, 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 murdered in Veracruz, a state in eastern Mexico.
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 RSF’s 2021 World Press Freedom Index. (I)
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