Peruvian Journalist and Election Candidate Susy Aponte Polo Shot Dead While Campaigning

Susy Aponte Polo, a Peruvian journalist who ran the news outlet China Polo Dominical, was shot dead Saturday while campaigning for a seat in the regional government of Ancash, according to Al Jazeera.

The attack happened near a market in Caraz, a city in Peru's Ancash region, according to Infobae's reporting carried by Ground News. Aponte, who went by the nickname China Polo, was walking with supporters when gunmen opened fire. Five other people were wounded, according to voxnews.al and Ground News.

Aponte's age was reported as 43 by Infobae and 44 by other outlets including iefimerida.gr. She was one of the candidates registered for Peru's October 4 regional elections.

A week before she was killed, Aponte said publicly that she had received death threats connected to her reporting on a police chief, according to Al Jazeera. voxnews.al reported the threats reportedly came from inside a prison, an account echoed by iefimerida.gr, which said she had "revealed she was receiving threats from inside prison" days before the shooting.

Her outlet had published stories alleging irregularities and corruption within the police, according to voxnews.al. Al Jazeera's report, which was the basis for coverage republished by Occasional Digest and 234 Radio, does not name who fired the shots or state a motive for the attack.

Al Jazeera's own account, and the outlets that simply reposted it, stop short of identifying a suspect. voxnews.al, however, reported that police announced the arrest of a suspect described as a Venezuelan national. Neither Peruvian authorities' identity of that suspect nor any formal charge has been independently confirmed across the sources reviewed here, and no source has established a confirmed link between the arrest and Aponte's reporting on the police chief. That connection remains an open question, not a proven fact.

The Peruvian Press Council, which represents journalists in the country, called for a full investigation into the killing, according to voxnews.al. The group noted that similar attacks on journalists in Peru "usually remain unsolved," a pointed statement about the country's track record on prosecuting violence against the press. According to local police figures cited by voxnews.al, four Peruvian journalists were killed in 2025.

Aponte's death lands amid a broader pattern of violence against people who challenge entrenched power in Latin America, though it falls in a different category than the cases tracked in a report the advocacy group Global Witness released this year. That report, covered by the Associated Press and carried by Breitbart, found at least 124 land and environmental defenders were killed worldwide in 2025, with Latin America accounting for 85% of those deaths. Colombia was the deadliest country for the fourth straight year with 39 killings, followed by Brazil with 26, and Honduras and the Philippines with 12 each, according to Global Witness. That report tracks activists fighting mining, logging and agribusiness encroachment, not journalists, and Aponte does not appear to be included in it. The two datasets point to the same underlying reality: in parts of Latin America, documenting corruption or defending land rights carries a real risk of being killed for it. Global Witness cautioned that a second straight year of declining global tallies does not mean the people doing this work are getting safer, since killings remain significantly underreported.

Peru's October 4 regional elections will proceed without Aponte on the ballot for the seat she sought. Whether prosecutors can establish whether the Venezuelan suspect reportedly in custody acted alone, whether the threats she described tracing back to a prison inmate are connected to her police-corruption reporting, and whether this case joins the list of unsolved journalist killings the Peruvian Press Council warned about, are all questions Peruvian authorities have not yet answered.