Journalists from various media outlets in San Diego County joined in solidarity and their work as reporters at a march led by hundreds of journalists from Tijuana in silence and rejection of the murders of photographer Margarito Martínez Esquivel and journalist Lourdes Maldonado López.
The march reached the Attorney General's Office in Tijuana, where journalist Sonia de Anda revealed that Lourdes Maldonado had been assigned surveillance by a patrol outside her home from 6 p.m. to 5 a.m.
However, on Sunday, she was shot at around 7 p.m. upon arriving to her home. The patrol had withdrawn, and the secretary of public security has evaded the press and refuses to report why the assigned officer left.
To the deaths of the two journalists from Tijuana and one in Veracruz, where José Luis Gamboa was stabbed to death on Jan.10.
The pressure grew when groups of journalists demonstrated in 47 cities in Mexico, including Mexico City, throughout Tuesday, where they hung photos of murdered journalists at the entrance to the presidential palace.
The Mexican government formed a working group that includes prosecutors, assigned to clarify the deaths of the three journalists. The governor of Baja California, Marina del Pilar Ávila, proposed that the state impose greater sanctions on those who attack journalists.
The state of Baja California also assigned a special prosecutor to investigate these deaths.
The European Union and the governments of Norway and Switzerland condemned the murder of Lourdes Maldonado and demanded that this and the other crimes against journalists be clarified.
"We express our concern about the lack of results in the open investigations to clarify previous cases of murders of journalists in Mexico," they said in a joint statement.
The United States embassy in Mexico said in a Twitter message that in that diplomatic headquarters they are “alarmed by the murder of journalist Lourdes Maldonado López, the third homicide of a journalist so far this year. We stand in solidarity with Mexican journalists.”
Reporters Without Borders reported that Mexico has been in the last three years the most dangerous place to practice journalism, with risk often greater than what journalists would face if they were covering a war.
The International Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) stated that in Mexico, reporters face "continuous brutality."
