One of Mexico’s best-known journalists said Friday that two gunmen on a motorcycle tried to kill him in a nighttime attack on a Mexico City street.
Radio and television reporter Ciro Gómez Leyva posted on social media a description of the attack and photos of his bullet-riddled vehicle.
He said the attack happened just before midnight on a street near his home and that he was spared because his truck had bulletproofing.
“Two hundred meters from my house, two people on a motorcycle shot at me, apparently with the clear intention of killing me,” Gómez Leyva wrote. The photos showed that at least two bullets had hit the driver’s side window of the vehicle.
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The Mexico City prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation.
This year has been one of the deadliest for Mexican media workers, with 15 deaths so far. But the killings and almost all the attacks have targeted journalists in provincial cities.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who often verbally argues with Gómez Leyva, condemned the attack.
The skyline of Mexico City, Mexico on September 23, 2022. A prominent Mexican journalist survived an attack by a gunman near his home in Mexico City.
(Cesar Rodriguez/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“He is a journalist, a human being, but he is also a leader of public opinion and the injuries to a person like Ciro generate a lot of political instability,” López Obrador said.
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“We have differences, they are notorious and public, we are going to continue having them,” said the president, “but it is totally reprehensible for anyone to be attacked.”
On his popular morning radio show, Gómez Leyva said of the president: “I have no differences with him. We do our job as journalists.”
López Obrador frequently uses his daily two-hour morning press conferences to accuse Gómez Leyva and other well-known journalists who criticize him of being part of a conservative conspiracy against his government.
The president has frequently verbally attacked journalists, calling them names like “sellouts,” “mercenaries” and “thugs.” Press groups say the president’s hostile comments have contributed to making journalists less safe in Mexico.
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2022 has been one of the deadliest for journalists in Mexico, now considered the most dangerous country for reporters outside of a war zone.
While organized crime is often involved in the murders of journalists, small-town officials or politically or criminally motivated politicians are also often suspected. Journalists who run small media outlets in the interior of Mexico are easy targets.
