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Mexican news director murdered less than a month after colleague

Rubén Pat is the second Semanario Playa News staff member to be shot recently

Photographs of murdered Mexican journalists lie beneath a camera at a protest in Mexico city last year Photograph: Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images

Wed Jul 25 2018 - 10:33

The director of a Mexican news website has been shot dead in the beach resort of Playa del Carmen, the second employee of the publication to have been killed in less than a month.

Rubén Pat, the director of the online outlet Semanario Playa News, was shot dead at around 5.48am on Tuesday outside a bar in the city 65km south of Cancun.

In a statement posted on Facebook, Playa News appealed to Carlos Manuel Joaquin Gonzalez, the governor of Quintana Roo state, which has been hard hit by violence in recent months.

“That’s two from our team, Governor, when will the lack of public safety in our state end?” the statement said.

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Pat was the sixth Mexican journalist believed to have been killed for his work in 2018. As is often the case in attacks on the country’s journalists, the immediate motive was not clear.

“They told me to stop publishing articles about a local police chief, and that I knew what would be coming to me if I didn’t,” Pat told the Committee to Protect Journalists.

He was the second Playa News employee to be murdered in less than a month. The reporter Jose Guadalupe Chan Dzib was killed in the municipality of Felipe Carrillo Puerto in late June. Chan Dzib’s slaying remains unsolved, common in a country where attacks on the media remain in the realm of impunity.

Quintana Roo state includes the crown jewels of Mexico’s Caribbean tourist industry – Cancun, Playa del Carmen and Tulum – but it has turned especially violent as drug cartels dispute control of a coveted territory for smuggling and retailing. In the first six months of 2018, the state’s murder rate has soared by 132 per cent.

Playa del Carmen was once a sleepy beach town next to the island of Cozumel, but it has been hit by explosive growth and increasing violence. A shooting at 2017 music festival in in the town left five people dead. – Guardian

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