The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has confirmed that two of the four photojournalists who were shot on Tuesday are in serious condition, while the prosecutor’s office confirmed that a fifth journalist was shot and wounded on the same day.

The four photojournalists were shot near a military barracks in the state of Guerrero, in the south of the country, when they returned from covering one of the many homicides that occur almost daily in the violence-wracked city of Chilpancingo.

López Obrador has said that “it is to be regretted,” referring to the shooting, but has not offered any information about the possible motive for the attack.

Another shooting on Tuesday in the neighboring state of Michoacán injured journalist Maynor Ramón Ramírez, bringing the death toll to five and marking one of the highest death tolls among media workers in a decade.

Ramírez suffered several gunshot wounds along with a companion in the city of Apatzingán, according to the Michoacán newspaper ABC.

The attacks came days after three journalists were kidnapped and held for days in Taxco, also in the state of Guerrero. They were later released, and there was no information about the reason for their kidnapping.

Guerrero has been the scene of bloody turf wars between a dozen gangs and drug cartels. Michoacán has suffered similar turf battles between the Jalisco cartel and local gangs.

Tuesday’s shootings and kidnappings constitute one of the largest mass attacks against reporters in a single location in Mexico since a day in early 2012, when the bodies of three news photographers were found dumped in plastic bags in a city canal. of Veracruz, on the Gulf coast. Those murders were attributed to the once powerful Zetas cartel.

Earlier this month, a newspaper photographer from the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez was found shot to death in his car. His death was the fifth case of murder of a journalist in Mexico so far in 2023.

In the last five years alone, the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented the murder of at least 54 journalists in Mexico.