The early morning of this Wednesday the journalist José Ignacio Santiago Martínez, founder and director of Pluma Digital News, was the victim of an armed attack, on the Yosonicaje-Tlaxiaco highway, when he was on his way to the city of Juchitlán, Oaxaca.
The Zapotec indigenous journalist was accompanied by the bodyguards assigned to him by the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists, he reported. Quadratín Oaxaca.
According to the same media, the bodyguards realized that they were being followed by a taxi where people carrying long weapons were transported.
Although they tried to lose them, the vehicle managed to reach them and they shot at the car where José Ignacio Santiago was, whom they protected, repelling the aggression, for which he was unharmed.
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In 2016 he had already been physically assaulted, he recalled. Quadratín Oaxaca, when he was run over and beaten while riding his motorcycle, after which he was left with broken arms and several serious injuries.
In a video published on his Twitter account – which he made after the murder of journalist Gustavo Sánchez, in June 2021 – Santiago Martínez denounced that the region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec was a red light to exercise freedom of expression.
“Journalists have already been killed here, we have been kidnapped, assaulted and we are being silenced,” he said.
The journalist also spoke out against the bureaucracy with which the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists was being managed.
He spoke out against the bureaucracy of the federal mechanism for the protection of journalists @SEGOB_mx @OmarBelloZihua @Xinich2 @alejandromurat @AlertaAMPDA @article19mex @lopezobrador_ @A_Encinas_R @CNDH @GobOax @RSF_esp @YanelyFuentes3 @medinamedios @CEAVmex @Jruizda79 #NosEstanMatando pic.twitter.com/oylAqBpT9C
— Jose Ignacio (@plumadigitalOax) June 20, 2021
The video was addressed to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who was asked to “turn to see” the region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where several colleagues had lost their lives.
“I am José Ignacio Santiago Martínez, an indigenous Zapotec journalist, who has experienced firsthand the aggressions by criminal groups that have tried to silence us in the region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, enough of that bureaucracy, enough of waiting for another journalist to be killed in Oaxaca, turn to see us and realize that Oaxaca is suffering because of freedom of expression.”
José Ignacio Santiago’s attack comes after the murders of journalists Lourdes Maldonado, Margarito Martínez Esquivel and José Luis Gamboa Arenas, all in less than two weeks.
Given this, on Tuesday the national mobilization against violence against journalists was organized in 27 states of the country.
The protest was also coordinated on social networks with the use of the hashtags #NiSilencioNiOlvido, #NoSeMataLaVerdad, #SinMasPeriodistasEnSusListas and #PeriodismoEnRiesgo.
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With the last murder, that of Lourdes Maldonado, the twenty-eighth homicide of one or an informant allegedly for his journalistic work so far in the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador was marked and the third in the year.
Since 2010, the Special Prosecutor’s Office for the Attention of Crimes Committed against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) in Mexico initiated 3,419 investigations for attacks on journalists and communicators, and of these, only 28 had achieved sentences against those responsible.
In November 2020, it was said that in the cases of 38 journalists killed so far in the López Obrador government, only two convictions had been obtained so far. Which yields more than 90% impunity.
With information from Quadratín Oaxaca.
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