Santiago, 21, a photographer with the local daily El Diario, and intern Carlos Sánchez Colunga, 18, were shot by unidentified gunmen in the parking lot of a shopping mall in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, according to news accounts. Santiago died at the scene of the 2:45 p.m. shooting. Sánchez was hospitalized with serious injuries.
The two were using a car that belonged to lawyer and human rights activist Gustavo de la Rosa, who lived in the United States, said a spokesman for the Chihuahua state prosecutor's office. El Diario reported that Santiago and Sánchez had borrowed the car from de la Rosa's son, an editor at the paper, to attend a photography workshop at the mall. Officials were investigating whether de la Rosa was the intended target, the prosecutor's spokesman said.
Santiago was the second El Diario journalist killed in as many years, CPJ research shows. A day after Santiago's death, the paper published an unusual, widely covered editorial. Addressing the cartels directly, it said El Diario would willingly compromise its news coverage in order to preserve its reporters' lives.