By: Mark Fitzgerald The publisher of a central Mexico weekly and his editor son were shot dead in broad daylight, apparently by gunmen who mistook the publisher for a lawyer in a controversial land case, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reported Friday.
RSF said it did not immediately appear that the homicides were related to the journalistic work of the pair.
Bonifacio Cruz Santiago was publisher of El Real, and his son, Alfonso Cruz
Cruz, was its editor. On Thursday, at about 10 a.m., they were outside the town hall of Chimalhuacan waiting to talk to a municipal lawyer. Two men in their 30s approached them, and opened fire.
RSF reported the son died on the spot, while his father died on the way to the hospital. Two municipal employees were wounded in the shooting.
El Real is a non-controversial weekly that mostly publishes state government handouts, and does not report on sensitive subjects such as drug trafficking, RSF said.
"This double killing comes just 48 hours after the murder of a journalist
in the northeast of the country," RSF said, referring to the Feb. 5 murder of Francisco Ortiz Monroy, a correspondent for the national daily El Diario de M?xico who was working in the northeastern Tamaulipas state. The circumstances of his killing are unclear, with some accounts saying he was targeted by armed men who shot him as he left a municipal office in Ciudad Camargo, and others saying he was caught in a cross-fire between a drug gang and soldiers.
The murder of the father and son journalists, RSF said, "highlights the climate of violence in which the press must operate in Mexico, the hemisphere's most dangerous country for the media."
Local media are reporting that the killers mistook the older Cruz for Olivares Diaz, a municipal lawyer who had recently received death threats in connection with a land dispute among peasants, RSF said.
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