Killing of Mexican reporter could be joined to area politics

CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico — Mexico’s president reported Thursday that the killing of a reporter in the northern border point out of Tamaulipas — the 12th so significantly this calendar year in Mexico — might be linked to neighborhood 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 in opposition to flexibility of expression.

De la Cruz’s daughter was critically wounded in the assault Wednesday in the Tamaulipas point out capital and was fighting for her lifetime at a nearby hospital.

On Thursday, a single of the reporter’s colleagues mentioned De la Cruz experienced been asked, evidently by state authorities, to clear away some of his tweets.

“On Twitter, Antonio criticized the condition govt a great deal and criticized the government,” reported fellow reporter Carlos Manuel Juárez. “He even informed me at one particular level that they had questioned him to get down some crucial tweets that he put up.”

Juárez explained the dread that reporters in Tamaulipas experience soon after the killing. The condition has long been dominated by drug cartels.

“It is pretty dangerous not to know wherever the attack arrived from, and our colleagues truly feel incredibly exposed. We never know if it is simply a political subject,” Juárez mentioned at the president’s morning press briefing.

López Obrador stated “the final decision to acquire about the situation (by federal prosecutors) was created since it became recognized that there experienced been criticism of local authorities.”

De la Cruz, 47, was a reporter for the area newspaper Expreso for almost 3 decades.

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

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

“We live in a state the place there has been a wave of violence for additional than a 10 years, and that has also influenced the push,” Domínguez explained. “Unfortunately, we have had to turn out to be applied to functioning in these conditions and consider excess precuations, and consider diligently irrespective of whether we are likely to publish a thing or not.”

Almost all of Tamaulipas’ the latest governors have faced accusations of corruption, ranging from cash laundering to aiding drug cartels.

De la Cruz’s demise introduced to 12 the quantity of journalists killed this year in the place, the deadliest for the Mexican push and the deadliest for any region outside a war zone.

De la Cruz was shot in a automobile in entrance of his household in Ciudad Victoria, the state cash, by a guy on a motorbike. His daughter was in the motor vehicle with him and was wounded.

Expreso handles all types of information in the town, together with protection difficulties. De la Cruz reported on rural and social matters this kind of as drinking water shortages.

He also included the Citizens Movement political occasion and its area deputy, Gustavo Cardenas Gutiérrez, who condemned the killing.

Expreso has been targeted in excess of the decades. In 2012, one particular of the worst years of drug cartel violence, a car bomb exploded in front of the newspaper’s creating. In 2018, a cooler with a human head inside was still left at the newspaper, with a warning not to report on violence in the town.