A group of journalists in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico’s murder capital, called on President Felipe Calderon to clear up the killings of their colleagues in the border city. The journalists made their plea for justice during Calderon’s visit Tuesday to Juarez, located across the border from El Paso, Texas.

Reporters and photographers from El Diario de Juarez, as well as Juarez Journalists Association members and community activists, gathered to demand that Calderon clear up the 2008 killing of Armando Rodriguez and the murder of Luis Carlos Santiago Orozco last month.

“With the murders of our journalist comrades, moreover, two voices dedicated to the very necessary job of reporting information to the residents of this city at this time of war that we are living through were silenced,” the journalists said in an open letter.

Santiago, a 21-year-old El Diario news photographer, was killed on Sept. 16 and his colleague, Carlos Sanchez, was wounded in an attack by suspected drug cartel hit men.

The gunmen waited for the two trainee news photographers to leave a shopping mall and enter their vehicle before opening fire, police said.

Santiago was the 11th journalist murdered in Mexico in 2010, Paris-based press-rights group Reporters Without Borders, or RSF, said.

Sixty-five journalists have been slain since 2000 in Mexico, according to the National Human Rights Commission, which is the country’s equivalent of an ombudsman’s office.

One of every 10 journalists murdered in Mexico was tortured, RSF said.

Calderon said during his visit that he was committed to “rescuing” Ciudad Juarez from the wave of violence unleashed in 2008 by drug traffickers.

Some 230,000 people have left Ciudad Juarez in the past three years as the death toll from a gang war for control of the illegal drug trade topped 7,000, a non-governmental organization said in a recent report.

“We are going to liberate the city from fear, threats and the terror in which it is caught up. We want you to not be conditioned to stay locked up in your house and to make use of public spaces,” Calderon said in a press conference.

Calderon traveled to the border city to meet with new Juarez Mayor Hector Murguia and Chihuahua Gov. Cesar Duarte.

The president participated in a series of events aimed at getting feedback about “Todos Somos Juarez,” a social development program launched in the wake of the massacre of 16 people, the majority of them students, at a birthday party in the border city on Jan. 31.

A total of “2,421 murders have been registered” in the drug war in Juarez this year, Citizens Crime Commission coordinator Arturo Valenzuela said.

A group of protesters gathered outside the meeting site to demand the withdrawal of the Federal Police and military units deployed in the border city.

Calderon traveled to Chihuahua city, the capital of the like-named state, for a security meeting with nine new governors. EFE