Two journalists are shot to death in Mexico

• North America A journalist is murdered in Mexico, the ninth in 2022

The Mexican press lives this year in

He does not finish overcoming the first blow and receives two more.

Unions and journalistic groups had called this Monday for the mobilization in twenty cities throughout the country to protest the murder, on May 4 in Sinaloa, of reporter

when they received tragic news: two colleagues had just of being shot to death in Veracruz.

Protesters have had to paint new signs to include the names of

on the list of 11 journalists killed in Mexico so far this year, reaching a chilling average of

Yessenia Mollinedo, director of the portal 'El Veraz' and one of her photographers, Johanna García, were shot this Monday, shortly before 4:00 p.m., when they left a store located in the Cerro Alto neighborhood, in the Veracruz municipality of Cosoleacaque.

they waited for the victims to approach their vehicle, pulled the trigger and fled.

Mollinedo and García were seriously injured on the shoulder and, although they were alive when the ambulances arrived, they died on the way to the hospital.

The crime was committed

in an industrial area and quite busy, so the investigators trust that the accounts of the witnesses who witnessed the murder, will allow them to catch the culprits.

The Veracruz Public Security Secretariat has activated the 'Red Code', an emergency operation that allows them to deploy helicopters to search the area and set up roadblocks to make it difficult for the killers to escape.

"Let it be clear to those who would not want to understand it, in Veracruz there are no longer any complicities nor will any of these attacks be tolerated," explained the governor of the state,

adding that: "we will find the perpetrators of this crime, there will be justice and there will be no impunity as we have said and done in other cases. The government is no longer ignorant or complicit, we are going after them".

The state of Veracruz registered 1,145 homicides last year and, in recent months, violent crimes have skyrocketed, fueled by the drug trafficking struggle for control of the territory and by the migrant smuggling mafias that use Veracruz highways to carry their 'clients' to the US border.

36 journalists murdered in AMLO's six-year term

This year is being especially violent for the Mexican press, in just over four months eleven journalists have already been murdered in different parts of the country:

According to figures from the organization 'Article 19', since Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) assumed power in Mexico there have been nearly

a notable rise over his predecessors in office.

At the end of their six-year terms, former presidents Enrique Peña Nieto and Felipe Calderón registered 47 and 48 murdered reporters;

AMLO could overtake them in the coming months, even though he still has more than two years left in office.

Under the slogans

Hundreds of people have gathered dressed in black at the Angel of Independence, in the Mexican capital, to express their outrage against the wave of attacks that the union is suffering.

The name of President López Obrador has been one of the most mentioned when it comes to denouncing the extreme vulnerability faced by many journalists throughout the country: working in extremely violent places, with few government resources allocated to their protection and with embarrassing rates of impunity (more than 90% of crimes against the press remain unsolved).

After learning of the double homicide of Yessenia Mollinedo and Johana García, the State Commission for the Attention and Protection of Journalists (CEAPP) has demanded that the authorities: "

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