Mexican crime reporter found murdered in Veracruz
Regina Martinez, a crime reporter who covered drug trafficking for investigative Mexican news magazine Proceso, was found dead in Veracruz state on Saturday, Fox News reported.
Officials said her body was found in the bathroom of her home in Xalapa, the Los Angeles Times reported. She appeared to have been beaten before being strangled to death.
On Friday, Proceso published a story she wrote on the arrests of nine municipal police officers suspected of drug ties, the Los Angeles Times reported.
According to Fox News:
Recently Veracruz has been plagued by cartel violence, some of it between the powerful Zetas and the so-called Jalisco Cartel New Generation, which is believed to be linked to the Sinaloa cartel.
Crime reporters who live in areas of Mexico with high levels of drug trafficking are regularly targeted by crime gangs, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Two other journalists have been found dead in Veracruz over the past year, Fox News reported. In June 2011, Miguel Angel López Velasco, a columnist and deputy editor with the newspaper Notiver was shot by gunmen, who also killed his wife and one of his children. In July 2011, Yolando Ordaz de la Cruz, a Notiver reporter who wrote about police affairs, was found with her throat slit.
At least 51 journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2000, according to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Fox News reported.
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.
7 killed in drug gang shootout
Seven people, including two members of the security forces and five people thought to be drug cartel members, have been killed in a shootout between rival gangs in the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, according to The Associated Press.
The gun battle broke out early Sunday near the town of Choix, causing the Mexican army and local police to intervene, the news agency said, citing a state police spokesman.
The spokesman said the area in the Sierra Madre is known to home to many drug traffickers.
Nearly 50,000 people have died since President Felipe Calderón called in the military battle Mexico’s powerful and feared drug cartels in 2006.
The Guadalajara Reporter said Saturday that Sinaloa police were warning drivers on the Carretera Internacional Mexico 15, a highway, of increasingly frequent robberies and carjackings.
An Australian couple returning by car to California were held up by four armed men last week, the newspaper said. The newspaper also cited the robbery of a cargo truck and the fact that the state education secretary himself had been robbed along the road.
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