Killing of Mexican reporter may be linked to local politics

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico — Mexico’s president stated Thursday that the killing of a reporter in the northern border condition of Tamaulipas — the 12th so significantly this calendar year in Mexico — may perhaps be joined to regional politics.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador explained federal prosecutors have taken about the investigation of the killing of reporter Antonio de la Cruz as a criminal offense versus flexibility of expression.

De la Cruz’s daughter was critically wounded in the assault Wednesday in the Tamaulipas state cash and was battling for her everyday living at a area medical center.

On Thursday, a person of the reporter’s colleagues said De la Cruz had been requested, evidently by condition authorities, to clear away some of his tweets.

“On Twitter, Antonio criticized the condition federal government a whole lot and criticized the government,” mentioned fellow reporter Carlos Manuel Juárez. “He even explained to me at a person point that they experienced requested him to acquire down some essential tweets that he put up.”

Juárez described the anxiety that reporters in Tamaulipas sense after the killing. The point out has very long been dominated by drug cartels.

“It is really perilous not to know where by the attack came from, and our colleagues come to feel quite exposed. We don’t know if it is only a political issue,” Juárez said at the president’s morning push briefing.

López Obrador explained “the choice to just take over the case (by federal prosecutors) was designed because it turned acknowledged that there experienced been criticism of regional authorities.”

De la Cruz, 47, was a reporter for the regional newspaper Expreso for practically 3 a long time.

The newspaper issued a print edition Thursday in black, with De la Cruz’s photograph and the word “Justice!” on the front website page.

“This is evidently an attack on independence of expression,” reported Expreso’s director, Miguel Domínguez.

“We stay in a condition where there has been a wave of violence for much more than a 10 years, and that has also affected the press,” Domínguez reported. “Unfortunately, we have had to become applied to performing in these circumstances and just take more precuations, and take into consideration cautiously whether we are heading to publish anything or not.”

Pretty much all of Tamaulipas’ recent governors have confronted accusations of corruption, ranging from revenue laundering to aiding drug cartels.

De la Cruz’s loss of life introduced to 12 the quantity of journalists killed this yr in the state, the deadliest for the Mexican push and the deadliest for any nation outside a war zone.

De la Cruz was shot in a car or truck in front of his house in Ciudad Victoria, the point out funds, by a guy on a motorcycle. His daughter was in the motor vehicle with him and was wounded.

Expreso handles all sorts of information in the city, like protection troubles. De la Cruz claimed on rural and social subject areas this sort of as h2o shortages.

He also lined the Citizens Movement political get together and its area deputy, Gustavo Cardenas Gutiérrez, who condemned the killing.

Expreso has been qualified in excess of the a long time. In 2012, a person of the worst several years of drug cartel violence, a auto bomb exploded in front of the newspaper’s making. In 2018, a cooler with a human head inside was left at the newspaper, with a warning not to report on violence in the city.