The UN condemns the sixth murder of a journalist in Mexico in 2023

The Mexico office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has condemned this Sunday the disappearance and murder of Mexican journalist Luis Martín Sánchez, whose lifeless body was found this weekend in the municipality of Tepic, Nayarit state.

The UN has regretted that, in addition to this event, two other local media collaborators have disappeared in the same area during the weekna, although one of them was located alive. For this reason, this office has requested coordination between the authorities to adopt the necessary measures to ensure the protection of the journalistic union in Nayarit.

Thus, they have urged a “prompt, exhaustive, independent, and effective investigation to fully clarify the facts and punish all those responsible,” while calling for “redouble efforts” to search, presumed to be alive, for the people who are still missing. Reporters Without Borders, for its part, mourned the death of Martín Sánchez and has denounced that this death demonstrates “the offensive of the armed groups against the press in the country” North American.

“The Nayarit Prosecutor’s Office points out that the crime is related to the journalistic work of the victim, which shows that the State must redouble its efforts to guarantee the freedom of the press. What has been done so far is clearly insufficient to stop this violence “, the organization has denounced. His body was found covered in bags and with a message that supposedly read “Publish what you want but don’t mess with the family”, after stealing his computer, hard drive and phone.

The 59-year-old journalist had been missing since Wednesday, when the attackers took various tools from the reporter’s work, who was a correspondent for the newspaper ‘La Jornada’ and collaborated with the local outlet Crítica Digital Noticias. In the year 2022, 17 journalists were assassinated in Mexico while investigating drug corruption and drug trafficking.