MEXICO CITY (AP) — A Cuban doctor was shot to death at a hospital in a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Mexico City, Mexico State prosecutors confirmed Monday night.
The doctor, whose name was not provided, was killed Friday along with a nurse and another woman at a hospital in the suburb of Ecatepec.
The killing comes after criticism of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s plan to hire hundreds of Cuban doctors to work where Mexican doctors are unavailable, or in areas where they don’t want to work because they are too dangerous or remote.
The Cuban doctor killed in Ecatepec apparently arrived in Mexico some time ago and was not part of the current contracting program. However, his death raised the question of whether some areas of Mexico are also too dangerous for Cuban doctors.
A woman who identified herself as the victim’s sister wrote on her Facebook account that the dead man was Ernesto Oliva Legra.
Prosecutors in the State of Mexico, which borders Mexico City, said two armed men entered the hospital early Friday and asked about a patient at the front desk.
Unable to locate her, the armed men forced the receptionist to also open the door to a medical area on the second floor, where they opened fire, killing the nurse and another woman, and injuring the doctor.
The doctor later died of his injuries at another hospital. Local media said the other victim was a woman who had been visiting a relative undergoing treatment.
Mexican gangs have been known to enter hospitals at gunpoint to finish off injured rivals, and Mexico has also seen a wave of violence against medical personnel.
In July, medical school graduates and residents rallied across the country to protest the July 15 shooting death of Erick David Andrade, 24, in the northern state of Durango while treating a patient. .
He was days away from completing the mandatory period of barely paid “social service” required of Mexican medical school graduates before beginning an internship or residency.
On July 11, an anesthesiologist at a rural government hospital was shot to death at her home in the neighboring state of Chihuahua.
In July 2021, a doctor was killed on a highway near Jerez, Zacatecas, after apparently failing to stop at a drug gang’s checkpoint. That same month, two paramedics were killed while transporting a patient in the same violence-plagued northern state.
Critics have also filed injunctions against the plan to hire some 500 specialized doctors from Cuba, dozens of whom have already arrived and are working in the western state of Nayarit.
The injunction asserts that the government has not proven that the doctors have the ability or the necessary training to practice in Mexico, and argues that most of the doctors’ pay could go to the Cuban government, not to the medical professionals themselves. .
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