In Mexico, killing of young doctor leads to protest

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The killing of a young doctor in Mexico has led recent medical school graduates to demand changes to a system that often leaves them exposed to danger in remote outposts during the first year of their careers as part of the country’s medical training system.

Dozens of medical school graduates in white coats marched in Mexico City Wednesday to protest the violence their colleagues face.

On July 15, 24-year-old Erick David Andrade, was shot to death in the northern state of Durango as he was treating a patient. He was days away from finishing the mandatory term of barely paid “social service” required of Mexican med school graduates before starting an internship or residency.

“I am a medical school graduate. Why are you going to kill me?” read a sign held by one of the marchers. “A dead doctor can't save lives,” read another.

Mexico has long had problems attracting medical workers to remote areas and rising gang violence has made that worse — for established as well as beginning doctors. On July 11, an anesthesiologist for a rural government hospital was shot to death at her home in the neighboring state of Chihuahua.

In July 2021, a doctor was killed on a highway near Jerez, Zacatecas, after she apparently failed to stop at a drug gang’s checkpoint. That same month two paramedics were murdered while transporting a patient in the same violence-plagued northern state.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has cited that reluctance to serve in such areas as justification for importing doctors from Cuba, the first of whom arrived last week.

“Violence gets bad and there are regions where people are in danger,” he said earlier this year. “The professionals, the doctors, don't want to go there, even though there are jobs open.”

Monica Armas, a recent med...