Mexico City, Jan 26 (AP) Demonstrations were held on Tuesday in at least eight cities across Mexico to protest the killings of three journalists in the last two weeks.

In the border city of Tijuana, two journalists were killed in the space of a week. On January 17, crime photographer Margarito Martínez was gunned down outside his home. And on January 23, reporter Lourdes Maldonado López was found shot dead inside her car.

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Early Tuesday, news photographers laid their cameras on the ground outside Mexico City's National Palace. The spot was decorated with flowers, small signs saying "Press, don't shoot!" and photos of Maldonado, Martínez and José Luis Gamboa, who died in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz on January 10.

Inside the palace, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador faced journalists at his daily news briefing and promised again that those responsible for the latest slaying would be punished, that there would not be impunity.

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But precedent is not encouraging. López Obrador's Interior Undersecretary Alejandro Encinas said recently that more than 90 per cent of killings of journalists and rights defenders remain unresolved, despite a government system meant to protect them.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists puts the percentage at 95, said its Mexico representative Jan-Albert Hootsen.

Protests were also held in the states of Veracruz, San Luis Potosí, Durango and Nayarit, with dozens of journalists gathering under placards reading "Not one more journalist killed" and “The Truth can't be killed".

Mexico remains the most dangerous place in the Western Hemisphere for journalists, despite the government's pledge to protect them. Some of the journalists killed recently had been under a government protection programme that many say is insufficient.

In 2019, Maldonado came to López Obrador's daily morning news briefing and asked for his support, help and labour justice. "Because I fear for my life," she said.

Maldonado had been locked in a years-long labour dispute with Jaime Bonilla, who was elected governor of Baja California later that year as a candidate from López Obrador's Morena party. He left office late last year.

Maldonado had recently announced that she won her dispute with a media company Bonilla owned after nine years of litigation.

Maldonado had collaborated with many outlets, but recently was doing an internet, radio and television show, "Brebaje", focussed on local news.

Martínez, the photographer gunned down outside his home, was well known for covering the crime scene in violence-plagued Tijuana. He worked for the local news outlet Cadena Noticias, as well as for other national and international media outlets.

Sonia de Anda, an activist with a Tijuana journalists' group, said "we are emotionally devastated" by the killings.

"We go out and work, because we have to," De Anda said, while noting there is "a lot of fear".

The first journalist killed this year, José Luis Gamboa, was the director of the online news site Inforegio, in the state of Veracruz. The press group Reporters Without Borders wrote that "Gamboa had denounced and strongly criticised the relations between local authorities and organised crime".

He reportedly suffered stab wounds in what may have been a robbery. He died on January 10, but his relatives were not informed until January 14.

Almost 50 journalists have been slain in Mexico since December 2018.

Encinas has said that in cases where the culprits have been identified, almost half are local officials.

Local officials in Mexico are often angered by corruption accusations against them, but in some cases, they are also in league with criminal or business interests.

Sometimes media attention intensifies, as in the case of the murder of well-known journalist Javier Valdez in Sinaloa state in 2017, and there are arrests, trials and sentences. In Valdez's case, two men who carried out the murder are serving sentences and the Attorney General's Office has requested the extradition of the alleged mastermind, a drug trafficker in US custody.

But that is an exception.

For more than three decades, the Tijuana news outlet Zeta has published a black page in every edition to demand the mastermind of the killing of one of its founders in 1988 be brought to justice. At Zeta, there has been a 34-year wait for justice for founder Héctor Félix Miranda.

"We are going to go out to protest, we are going to cry, we are going to suffer," Zeta's top editor Adela Navarro said on the streaming programme "The Journalists". (AP)

(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)