The tortured body of a Mexican police reporter was found on the side of a road in Sonora State on Friday, a day after he was kidnapped by gunmen while waiting at a car wash, authorities said.
Marco Antonio Avila Garcia’s body was found inside a black plastic bag near the city of Empalme, about 110km south of Ciudad Obregon, where he was abducted, Sonora state prosecutors’ spokesman Jose Larrinaga said.
Larrinaga said police also found a message signed by a cartel, but he would not reveal the message’s content.
Photo: EPA
The 39-year-old reporter often wrote about organized crime for the sister newspapers Diario Sonora de la Tarde and El Regional de Ciudad Obregon, Larrinaga said.
Avila was snatched and forced into a pickup truck on Thursday by three masked gunmen as he waited for a company car to be washed in Ciudad Obregon. Eduardo Flores, director of the newspapers, said Avila wrote about drug trafficking, but never mentioned cartels by name nor did investigative pieces.
“He wrote about drug trafficking, but nothing involved” about it, Flores said. “He wasn’t allowed to cover anything that would be considered aggressive by criminal groups.”
Flores said Avila was among the most experienced police reporters on his staff. The journalist never mentioned receiving threats or being afraid of covering the police beat. No threats had been received by the newspapers, he added.
The reporter was married and had three small children. He worked at night and during the day was going to university. He recently graduated with a degree in chemistry.
Mexico has become one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists in recent years, with media workers disproportionately targeted. Last week, gunmen opened fire on the offices of the El Manana newspaper in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. The week before, police found the mutilated bodies of three photojournalists inside plastic bags dumped in a canal in Veracruz State.
Prosecutions in journalist killings are rarely carried out, which is generally the case with most homicides and other serious crimes in Mexico.
The Mexican National Commission on Human Rights says 81 journalists were killed between 2000 and this year. In addition, it said 14 have disappeared. Other press freedom groups differ with that number.
The commission said on Friday it had opened an investigation into the death of Rene Orta Salgado, a journalist who had quit working for El Sol de Cuernavaca newspaper in the resort city of Cuernavaca in January. Police found Orta’s body inside his car’s trunk last Sunday; he had apparently been strangled.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS