Laurent Ángel Castillo Cifuentes, a correspondent for the newspaper Nuestro Diario and a local culture magazine, was found dead on February 1, 2018, in a cane plantation in Santo Domingo Suchitepéquez, southwest of the capital of Guatemala. The bodies of Castillo and another media worker were found with their hands and feet tied, and with bullet wounds to the head. According to the public prosecutor, they were also strangled. Castillo was reportedly covering a local carnival with the help of his friend, who was also killed. Castillo’s family said that the journalist had recently received threatening phone calls but family members said they didn’t believe the calls were linked to his reporting.