Mexican photojournalists mourned amid growing fears
23 more bodies found in Mexican border town Nuevo Laredo
Grieving Mexican journalists gathered Friday to remembered three slain colleagues as young and energetic members of a press corps that reports in the crossfire between the country's two most powerful drug cartels.
Dozens more discovered dead in Nuevo Laredo
Just one day after the journalists were found, 23 more brutalized bodies were discovered in the Mexican border city of Nuevo Laredo, according to a state official.
The Tamaulipas state official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said nine bodies were left hanging from a bridge and 14 more were decapitated and abandoned in a car. Drug cartel violence is likely responsible for the gruesome deaths.
Nuevo Laredo, which is roughly 250 kilometers southwest of San Antonio, Texas, has long been plagued by a war between the Zetas cartel, a group formed by former Mexican special-forces soldiers, and their former allies in the Gulf Cartel.
Traffic dwindled from the streets and shopping areas emptied hours after the discovery Thursday afternoon of photojournalists Guillermo Luna Varela, Gabriel Huge, Esteban Rodriguez and civilian Irasema Becerra, who had been slain, dismembered and stuffed into black plastic bags dumped into a waste canal.
It was a sense of dread familiar to Veracruz, where a cartel battle for control of one of Mexico's largest ports has spawned horrors such as the slaughter of 35 people dumped on a main highway in rush-hour traffic in September.
At least seven current and former reporters and photographers have been slain in Veracruz over the last 18 months, forcing their surviving colleagues to work under precautions reminiscent of those in a war zone.
Mexico's human rights commission says 74 media workers were slain from 2000 to 2011. It noted in a statement on the Mexico killings that Thursday was World Press Freedom Day.
Journalists let colleagues and family know by phone when they are leaving for work and coming home. They call ahead before covering a story to see if the area is safe. Once they go, they move in groups of four or five and scan areas from the vehicle before getting out, remaining in constant contact with their newsroom.
Few talk anymore with strangers, a new reticence in an area once known for its tropical warmth and welcoming attitude to tourists and other visitors.
Mother begged her son to leave journalism
Photojournalists targeted
Luna was a crime-news photographer for the Veracruz news website who was last seen by local reporters covering a car accident Wednesday afternoon. He began his career working for the local newspaper Notiver.
Huge worked as a photojournalist for Notiver until last summer, when both men fled the state soon after two of the paper's reporters were slain in still-unsolved killings.
Esteban Rodriguez was a photographer for the local newspaper AZ until last summer, when he too quit and fled the state. He later came back, but took up work as a welder.
The fourth victim was Luna's girlfriend, Irasema Becerra, state prosecutors said.
Huge, a new father who was in his 30s, and Luna, his 22-year-old nephew, were "part of a new generation of young photographers who permeate the media in Veracruz," wrote Sandra Segura, a columnist for the newspaper Notiver, where both men had previously worked.
Along with the two other victims, who included the girlfriend of one of the men, "they were all spouses, children, siblings, parents, like Gabriel, the father of a 2-year-old girl. All of them had a future snatched away in an instant," she wrote.
Friends and relatives of Huge and Luna filled the single-story cinderblock house where Luna had lived with his family. The bodies of the two men lay in open coffins but covered in white sheets. Luna's favorite baseball cap rested on his sheet.
Luna's mother, Mercedes Varela, said she had begged him to leave journalism, but he had refused, saying he had nothing to fear. She described her son as a ferociously dedicated journalist who listened constantly to all-news radio.
The sound filled their small house at all hours. "That's what I'm going to miss," she said.
Deaths latest in string of reporter slayings
The four were discovered less than a week after Regina Martinez, a correspondent for the national magazine Proceso, was found beaten and strangled in her home in the state capital of Xalapa.
Martinez was one of the few reporters in Veracruz who continued to work on drug cartel-related stories.
Her last story for the magazine was about the arrest of nine police officers accused of links to drug traffickers, but she did not work on any of the longer-term stories that have gained Proceso a reputation for deep investigations that anger the powerful in Mexico, according to a high-ranking editor at the paper, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.
Drug cartels battling for control of smuggling routes often use threats, bribes or both to demand the support of local officials, prison directors and other influential people in the cities they are fighting over. Reporters have not been spared.
In June, Miguel Angel Lopez Velasco, a columnist and editorial director for Notiver, was shot to death in Veracruz along with his wife and one of his children.
Authorities that month also found the body of journalist Noel Lopez buried in a clandestine grave in the town of Chinameca. Lopez, who disappeared three months earlier, had worked for the weeklies Horizonte and Noticias de Acayucan and for the daily newspaper La Verdad.
The following month, Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz, a police reporter for Notiver, was found with her throat cut in the state. Lopez was found after a suspect in another case confessed to killing him, but the other two murders have not been resolved.
Prosecutions for murder, including those of journalists, are rare in Mexico.