The murder of Armando Linares López, director of the news portal Monitor Michoacán, has alerted the Michoacán newspaper union, who were threatened yesterday afternoon during the communicator’s funeral.
Versions of the attendees indicate that during the funeral services to fire the journalist Linares López, shot to death at his home on Tuesday afternoon, four armed persons arrived at the scene and threatened reporters and relatives of the victim who were at the scene.
“We were covering the wake of colleague Armando Linares, when a subject with a gun in his hand threatened us that we would leave or “we were going to be worth a dick,” Milenio reporter Edgar Ledesma wrote on Twitter.
He reported that a subject armed with a pistol at his waist, a leather jacket and a cap approached them and “told us that we had two minutes to leave the place or we were going to be worth it.”
Given the reports on social networks, the Michoacán Police indicated that they had not registered the presence of armed men or received complaints for alleged threats during the funeral of the journalist, Armando Linares, and that from the beginning surveillance support had been provided in the place to request of the relatives of the communicator.
Earlier this Wednesday, journalists from various media outlets took to the streets to demand justice and an end to violence against the country’s press.
The mobilization broke into the State Congress, where the protesters asked to enter and express their disagreement with the deputies, they also went to the Government Palace, where they found the doors closed.
Before the legislators, they passed a list of the journalists murdered so far this year and later demanded a reform of the Penal Code to generate aggravating circumstances in the case of murders of journalists.
They ask for concrete actions
Condemning the recent murder of journalist Armando Linares, director of the news portal Monitor Michoacán, —the eighth communicator killed in just two and a half months of the year—, journalists like Carmen Aristegui; Lucia Lagunes, executive director of the Women’s Information Communication Center, CIMAC; Marcela Turati, journalist and founder of Quinto Element Lab; Ismael Bojórquez, director of the Riodoce Weekly and Paula Saucedo, officer of the Article 19 Protection and Defense program; They demanded that the federal government stop and act against the escalation of physical and verbal attacks suffered by journalists.
“Approximately every 13 or 14 hours a journalist or media outlet is attacked for doing their job. In addition to the murders there are death threats, legal threats, physical attacks, intimidation, every day.
“Polarization, stigma, criminalization, singling out, only increases the risk of suffering more violence,” stressed Paula Saucedo, from Article 19 during the Freedom of Expression Forum, organized by Article 19 and the Norwegian Embassy.
At the same event, Lucia Lagunes, executive director of the Women’s Information Communication Center (CIMAC), stressed that the message for the federal government was clear when she pointed out that the attempt to attack the press is wrong, since violence has escalated, and has generated censorship.
For his part, Ismael Bojórquez, director of the Riodoce Weekly, maintained that the impunity of more than 95% in murder cases, a figure recognized by the government itself, generates pessimism.
“When Javier (Valdez) was killed, we said: it will not be the last. Because he was killed in a context of generalized violence throughout the country (…) More than three years have passed and we still do not have from the federal government a clear and accurate diagnosis of where the exit is, that is what worries the most”, he added.
While the Undersecretary for Human Rights, Population and Migration of the Ministry of the Interior, Alejandro Encinas, acknowledged that it has not been possible to stop the violence against the press, much less reverse it.