CJNG’s El Jardinero has Journalist Tortured and Executed in Nayarit
Translated excerpt:
Shortly after a group of journalists planned to release information on El Jardinero, a cartel leader within the CJNG, hitmen arrived at the journalists’ homes in Nayarit and abducted them. One of the journalists has now been found dead alongside two narco messages.
.....The journalist Luis Martín Sánchez Íñiguez drove his wife Cecelia to her relatives house in Acaponeta, Nayarit, on July 5, 2023.
He dropped her off and returned home to finish some errands. He called Cecelia later that night to check in on her and tell her about his day. At around 8:43 pm, the couple cut their call short because of a power outage.
That phone call was the last time Cecelia ever heard her husband’s voice. At some point after their call, CJNG gunmen kidnapped Luis Sanchez. He was one of three journalists that the cartel group abducted that week in order to silence their reporting, which revealed new details about the regional CJNG leaders. Also kidnapped were journalists Jonathan Lora Ramírez and Osiris Maldonado De la Paz.
Word spread about the kidnappings and the police began looking into the three missing men. .....
.....On July 8, the location of a dead body was reported to the emergency phone line. The body was found in the town of El Ahuacate, located within the municipality of Tepic [in the state of Nayarit].
The body was found with signs of torture and two pieces of cardboard with a handwritten message. The dead body was identified by his family as one of the aforementioned men, named Luis Martín Sánchez Iñiguez. An autopsy has revealed that he was killed 24-48 hours prior to when his body was found [on July 8].
As for the journalist Jonathan “N”, he has been found alive and in good health, according to the corresponding victim health and psychological condition protocols.
.....reports that the hitmen took Sánchez’s computer, hard drive, and cellphone while they were abducting him. Cecelia adds that his newspaper ID and his wallet were also missing and likely taken by the men.
So far, no images of the narco messages or the location where Luis Sanchez was found have appeared online. Only a few pictures of crime scene investigators standing in the general area have been published.
Yesterday, it was reported that Osiris was found alive, presumably released by his captors. This means that now all three of the kidnapped men have been found, two of them alive and one brutally murdered.
.....The actions of the CJNG hitmen were primarily focused on preventing the release of photos of Jardinero himself.
The journalist was tortured, murdered, and left in a public space with a narco message because Jardinero wanted to intimidate other journalists into not publishing photos of him in the future.
.....Many international publications, such as the Associated Press (via The Guardian & CBS), BBC, Al Jazeera, and Reuters have picked up on the story about Luis Sánchez being kidnapped and murdered. It adds to the larger narrative about how dangerous it is for journalists who live in Mexico.
But what has not been picked up on is who he was writing about prior to his death (El Jardinero) and who controls Nayarit, the state the murder happened in (El Jardinero).
International coverage of the event has not even bothered to mentioned the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) in relation to the murder - even though it is the only group believed to currently operate in Nayarit and has been cited as such in multiple reputable sources, including the Mexican government’s own intelligence.
Any modicum of research into the state would have shown that the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación was deserving of, at the very least, a brief mention in their articles. But instead, we get from these international media companies, a litany of bland articles which mention the same statistics on violence against journalists in Mexico that are always mentioned.
The journalists in Mexico are facing a real and present danger from narcos when they write, along with a repressive set of Mexican laws which forbid the showing of faces and the printing of full names of cartel figures prior to them being convicted. Their inability to write fully on these topics is, in many ways, understandable.
.....the international journalists who are paid to report on these topics should be taking full advantage of their safety from cartel retribution and their freedom from Mexico’s legal system, and put in some degree of research when covering the murder of a Mexican journalist, not if it happens - but when it happens next time.