The International Press Institute (IPI) was troubled to learn of the deaths of two journalists in Mexico and urged the country’s federal government to conduct impartial and thorough investigations in both cases.

Gunmen shot radio broadcaster Filadelfo Sánchez Sarmiento on Thursday morning in Miahuatlán de Porfirio Díaz, a town in the southern state of Oaxaca. The attack occurred as Sarmiento left his station, 103.3 FM La Voz de la Sierra Sur, following his morning show, “La Favorita”.

Sarmiento hosted a news show and worked with local newspapers, according to local news sources. He had reportedly received multiple telephone threats, but the motive of the killers is not known. Local authorities have begun a search for the suspects.

Sánchez’s death came one day after blogger Juan Mendoza Delgado was found dead in the eastern state of Veracruz. Delgado directed a website called “Writing the Truth” and had worked as a local crime reporter.

Agency France-Presse reported that the State Commission for the Protection and Attention of Journalists said the death was a homicide and that state police had begun a search for the killer.

Delgado is one of many journalists in Veracruz who have disappeared or been killed — the state is considered the most dangerous in Mexico for journalists.

The country as a whole has become notoriously unsafe for journalists as impunity has festered unchecked in recent years, particularly since December 2006 when Mexico’s military intervened in the government’s struggle with powerful drug cartels.

According to IPI’s Death Watch, at least 54 journalists have lost their lives in connection with their work in Mexico since then, but another 30 lost their lives in the preceding nine years.

“Our thoughts go out to the family, friends and colleagues of Filadelfo Sánchez Sarmiento and Juan Mendoza Delgado, and to the dozens of other journalists who have lost their lives in Mexico,” IPI Director of Advocacy and Communications Steven M. Ellis said. “Far too many journalists have been targeted in Mexico in recent years and the lack of justice for their killings seems only to invite further violence.”

At IPI’s World Congress in Yangon, Myanmar in March, Mexican journalist Daniela Pastrana accepted IPI’s 2015 Free Media Pioneer Award on behalf of Periodistas de a Pie, a group that works to improve journalists’ safety in Mexico. In her speech, she illustrated the violence her fellow journalists have faced in recent years.

“Fear and death arrived at our doors, at our homes,” Pastrana recounted. “Without knowing how, without being prepared, we journalists became war correspondents in our own country. First in the line of fire, we fell victims to a strategy that used terror to hide information, to bury it in graves, and dissolve it with acid. It is a strategy whose result has been a bacchanal of death and pain.”