Margarito Martínez Esquivel and José Luis Gamboa are the latest casualties in the world’s most dangerous country for reporters outside war zones
Summary
- Mexico’s embattled press corps has suffered a shattering start to the new year with the murders of two journalists who had dared chronicle their country’s slide into drug- and corruption-fuelled violence.
- Martínez’s death came a week after another journalist, José Luis Gamboa, was fatally stabbed in the eastern state of Veracruz, another of Mexico’s most violent regions.
- Last year he lamented how parts of the government, instead of fighting drug trafficking, had been sucked into “a great criminal association” with the cartels.
- The group said Martínez was the 29th Mexican journalist to be killed since Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, took power in December 2018 promising to pacify the country.
- I can’t believe Margarito Martínez is gone … they murdered him in cold blood,” wrote one friend, Gabriela Díaz.