Mexican journalist shot dead while under police protection

Armed ‘civilian attackers’ kill Alejandro Martínez Noguez, who covered one of the country’s most dangerous crime beats

A Mexican journalist who covered one of the country’s most dangerous crime beats has been killed by gunmen.
Alejandro Martínez Noguez was killed on Sunday when “civilian attackers in a pick-up truck opened fire with long guns at a car assigned to the reporter and his team of bodyguards by the city government”, officials said.
Martínez, who was in his fifties, was shot in the head and two of his government-assigned bodyguards were wounded and were receiving treatment.
His news site covered community news and crime in Celaya, the most dangerous city for police officers in Mexico.
In recent weeks his site had published reports of arrests for crimes including attempted murder, sexual exploitation and homicide, along with headshots of people it described as leaders of “criminal cells” .
Hours before he was attacked, Martínez covered a fatal car accident on a dangerous stretch of highway and posted a 20-minute video about the incident on his news site’s Facebook page, which has about 344,000 followers.
Prosecutors in the north-central state of Guanajuato said they were investigating his killing.
In 2022, Martínez survived a shooting and had been assigned police protection under a federal programme for reporters who receive death threats.
In a 2021 video, when Martínez was asked if he had become used to the violence, he broke down in tears and said: “It hurts me to see Celaya like this. It hurts me to see everything that happens. It hurts me to see dead people.”
Guanajuato has the highest number of homicides of any of Mexico’s 32 states, largely because of a years-long turf war between the Jalisco drug cartel and the local Santa Rosa de Lima gang. A total of 18 Celaya police officers have been fatally shot so far this year in the city of half a million inhabitants. Drug gangs are suspected of carrying out most of those killings.
Media workers are regularly targeted in Mexico, often in direct reprisal for their work covering topics such as corruption and the country’s notoriously violent drug traffickers.
In April, Roberto Figueroa, who covered local politics and gained a social media following through satirical videos, was found dead inside a car in his hometown of Huitzilac in Morelos, a state south of Mexico City where drug-fuelled violence runs rampant.
On June 29, Victor Culebro, director of another news page on Facebook, was found dead along a highway in the southern state of Chiapas, and last week Federico Hans, a journalist in the town of Caborca in northern Sonora state, was shot and wounded as he got into his car outside his home.
Since 2000, 141 Mexican journalists and other media workers have been slain, at least 61 of them in apparent retaliation for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists says. All but a handful of the killings and abductions remain unsolved.