COATZACOALCOS, Mexico (AFP) – A Honduran journalist who sought asylum in Mexico after a colleague he collaborated with was murdered has been killed in the violent state of Veracruz, authorities and activists said.
Edwin Rivera Paz was followed by gunmen and shot dead in broad daylight Sunday in the eastern city of Acayucan, said local authorities and the media rights group Reporters Without Borders.
The TV news cameraman is the seventh journalist killed this year in Mexico, where more than 100 reporters have been murdered since 2000.
The situation is almost as dangerous in his native Honduras, where 69 journalists have been killed since 2003 — most recently Rivera’s boss, Igor Padilla.
Padilla, a journalist for news channel HCH in the Honduran capital, was killed in a drive-by shooting in January as he filmed a commercial.
That prompted Rivera, who was his close collaborator, to flee to Mexico. He had just been granted refugee status before he was killed, according to Reporters Without Borders.
He had been working on a documentary about the problems facing migrants and refugees, said fellow asylum-seekers from Central America.
Honduras called on Mexico to bring Rivera’s killers to justice.
“We are asking the state prosecutor to investigate. Do not let this crime go unpunished,” the Honduran consul in Mexico, Raul Otoniel Morazan, told AFP.
Reporters Without Borders urged both countries to investigate.
“Do not let this hateful crime go unpunished like so many others,” the watchdog group’s Latin America director, Emmanuel Colombie, said Tuesday in a statement.
Mexico is the third deadliest country for journalists in the world, after the war zones of Syria and Afghanistan, according to the organization.
More than 90 percent of journalists’ killings remain unpunished (Agence France-Presse).
