Colleagues of slain Mexican journalist protest in Acapulco
Acapulco, Mexico, Aug 23 (EFE).- Journalists in this resort city on Mexico’s Pacific coast gathered Tuesday to demand justice for a colleague who was fatally shot while sitting in a car in front of his home.
“Yesterday afternoon comrade Fredid Roman was cunningly murdered in the city of Chilpancingo, where, it appears, lack of preventive security is the norm in the capital of the state (Guerrero),” Ignacio Hernandez Meneses said during the event in Acapulco.
Roman’s death brings to 16 the number of news professionals killed in Mexico so far this year.
“It is very difficult to do journalism in Mexico. Unfortunately, the conditions nowadays don’t permit the exercise of the profession,” journalist union official Ernesto Caballero said.
Roman presided over an online news program, “The Reality of Guerrero,” and wrote a newspaper column.
“Fredid was not a journalist with critical opinions, he wasn’t a journalist who got mixed up in problems,” Caballero said, before noting that Roman was killed hours after publishing a Facebook post about the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from Guerrero’s Ayotzinapa teachers college.
Last week, a truth commission labeled the abduction and murder of the students as a “state crime.”
At least 154 media professionals have been killed in Mexico over the last 22 years according to figures compiled by the Mexico and Central America chapter of the press-freedom organization Article 19.
Forty of those homicides have occurred since President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador took office in December 2018.
Earlier Tuesday, the Mexico delegation of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the murder of Roman and called on authorities to “redouble efforts” to solve the case.
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