The IAPA expressed repudiation of the murder of a press worker and attacks on two news media outlets in the Mexican state of Coahuila and urged the authorities to conduct an immediate investigation. It also issued a public call on President Felipe Calderón to honor his pledge to pursue legal reforms to put an end to the violence unleashed against media and individual journalists.

Rodolfo Ochoa Mofreno, 27, a technician with the Grupo Multimedios multimedia company in Torreón, received 9mm gunshot wounds and died. Masked intruders burst into the Multimedios transmission facility in the early morning, shot him and stole equipment stored there. No group has claimed responsibility for the incident. 

IAPA President Gonzalo Marroquín, president of the Guatemala City, Guatemala, newspaper Siglo 21, condemned the murder and the attack on Multimedios and another media outlet and their staffs, declaring that “the same pattern of violence that we witnessed last year is clearly continuing this year.” 

The police reported that it had been warned about bomb blasts at the broadcast facilities of Multimedios and Radiorama planned for early yesterday. The assailants had gone first to the Radiorama plant, where they beat up a security guard and a companion and damaged equipment. They then proceeded to the Multimedios facility, where they forced open the main door and killed Ochoa Moreno as he tried to call for help.

Sources consulted by the IAPA said that the attacks on the media premises were part of a pattern of conduct by underground gangs that are seeking to get noticed and create fear among the local people. Following the attacks Radiorama and Multimedios stayed off the air for several hours. 

The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, Texas, recalled that Mexico’s President Calderón had pledged in September last year before delegations from the IAPA and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to once again pursue legislative reforms to make crimes against journalists federal offenses, stiffen penalties and lengthen statutes of limitation so as to bring to an end the wave of violence unleashed against the press. 

In Coahuila also murdered have been journalists Valentín Valdés Espinosa on January 7, 2010 and Eliseo Barrón Hernández, on May 26, 2009, while Rafael Ortiz Martínez has been missing since July 8, 2006.