MEXICO CITY:—The program “Punto de Partida” (Starting Point) hosted by journalist Denise Maerker and aired by Televisa tonight (July 29) suspended its weekly broadcast due to the reporters being held since Monday in La Laguna, Durango state.

The IAPA expressed deep concern for this week’s kidnapping of four reporters in the Mexican state of Durango and for the grave level of violence in the country, calling on the government to act urgently to safeguard the lives of the missing and the fundamental rights of citizens in general.

Journalist Alfredo Jiménez Mota, a specialist in organized crime and public safety topics for the newspaper El Imparcial, went missing on Saturday, April 2, 2005. His abduction was clearly linked to his reporting work in recent months, in which he published information about drug trafficking organizations operating in Sonora state.

The story of the murder of Manoel Leal de Oliveira, founder and owner of the Itabuna, Bahia, newspaper A Região, will be the subject of a movie with all the intrigues that often fascinate the public. Corruption, cheating, collusion, there is a little of them all in this story which began long before January 14, 1998, when six shots took the life of the journalist.

WASHINGTON, DC (July 16, 2010)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) said here today that violence against journalists is one of the greatest challenges that governments and inter-governmental agencies must take on if they want to ensure democracy in the Americas.

The IAPA expressed outrage and horror at the murders of two more journalists in Mexico over the weekend in Nuevo León and Chihuahua, bringing to nine the number of newsmen killed this year.

The IAPA welcomed the expected decision by the Mexican government to create a new Special Prosecutor’s Office to Deal With Crimes Committed Against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE in its Spanish-language acronym).

The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) expressed approval of a decision by the Colombian Attorney General’s Office to consider the 1986 murder of journalist Guillermo Cano Isaza a “crime against humanity” and urged authorities to take the same action in other unpunished crimes against journalists.

Manuel Burgueño Orduño was a journalist and they killed him. At his home, in front of his family, they shot him. That was what was ordered by a Sinaloa police chief who was working for a drug cartel, because Burgueño was writing about corruption, he denounced the lack of punishment and the dirty business between the drug traffickers and the police. They shut him up.

The IAPA denounced the murder of Hugo Alfredo Olivera Cartas in Michoacán and called on the Mexican government to take immediate steps to guarantee press freedom and promptly solve this crime.

The IAPA soundly condemned the ongoing violence unleashed against reporters in Mexico following the murder of two reporters in Guerrero state – bringing to six the number so far this year – and called for immediate action by the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Dealing with Crimes Against Journalists to determine who is responsible.

Husband and wife journalists Juan Francisco Rodríguez Ríos, 51, and María Elvira Hernández Galeana, 37, were murdered on Monday, June 28 in the Internet café that they owned in the town of Coyuca de Benítez, in Guerrero state.