José “Pepe” Merino, 46, led Mexico Metropolis’s knowledge company. “Gay, atheist, socialist, political scientist,” declared his Twitter bio. He was an outspoken defender of transparency in a rustic nonetheless shadowed by its authoritarian previous. As a tutorial, he’d based the information weblog at Nexos again in 2016. The subsequent yr, he led an audacious effort to extract data from a authorities database of 32,000 disappeared folks. Then he embraced the leftist motion of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who gained the presidency in 2018.