Alejandro Martínez Noguez was shot and killed while in a car with his bodyguards in the central Mexican state of Guanajuato on August 4, 2024.
Martínez went by the nickname “El Hijo del Llanero Solitito” (The Son of the Lone Ranger) and ran a popular Facebook page with that same name, in which he covered crime in the city of Celaya, a four-hour drive north of Mexico City. The page had nearly 350,000 followers.
Minutes before he was killed, Martínez did a live broadcast via his Facebook page on a traffic accident in Celaya that killed an elderly man. In the video, he criticized the poor infrastructure at the place of the accident and called on drivers to limit their speed.
Guanajuato state, particularly the region around the cities of Celaya and Salamanca, have recently seen a sharp increase in violent turf wars between drug gangs. Several reporters have been killed in the area in the past five years.
Martínez was a veteran journalist with over 30 years of reporting experience with several regional and national print and radio outlets, according to a profile by national magazine Expansión.
Martínez had been assigned police guards after a previous attempt on his life in November of 2022, according to El País. Martínez was attacked at his residence by an alleged member of an organized crime group, presumably over his coverage of the crime beat, but was unharmed when the gun jammed. No further information, such as a possible motive or the attacker’s identity, was made public by authorities.
CPJ called the Guanajuato state prosecutor’s office (FGE) several times in late 2024 for comment; despite assurances from a junior agency official, the calls have not yet been returned.