The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today expressed outrage at the murder in Mexico of reporter Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz from the Veracruz newspaper Notiver and issued a strong call on the country’s federal and state authorities to investigate the crime to identify those responsible.

IAPA President Gonzalo Marroquín, president of the Guatemala City, Guatemala, newspaper Siglo 21, offered his sympathy to the journalist’s family and colleagues and urged the Mexican authorities “to act promptly and investigate the crime so as to determine who was responsible and prevent those who resort to violence in restricting press freedom in Mexico from continuing to go unpunished.”

Ordaz de la Cruz, who covered security and drug trafficking matters for her newspaper, had gone missing on July 24. Her abandoned body was discovered this morning in the Veracruz township of Boca del Río, with signs of her having been tortured and having her throat slit. Local news media quoted official sources as saying the motive for her murder was not immediately known.

She was the second journalist from the same newspaper to have been killed in a little over one month. Miguel Angel López Velasco, a Notiver columnist, his wife and 21-year-old son were murdered on June 20 by an armed group that burst into their home.

For his part, the chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, repeated a request that “the government should honor its commitment made in September last year to pursue legal reforms to make the murder of a journalist a federal offense and to ensure reporters’ safety.”

Ordaz de la Cruz had been indirectly threatened on blankets thrown over the bodies of people who had been murdered and in videos shown on Youtube. In those warnings it was suggested that she was linked to a group of drug traffickers belonging to the self-styled Zetas cartel, according to information obtained by the IAPA’s Rapid Response Unit in Mexico. Officials, who have not begun an investigation into this, discarded the possibility that the crime is connected to the publication of news reports, although think it might be linked to organized crime.

So far this year in addition to Ordaz de la Cruz and López Velasco, both from Notiver, also murdered in Mexico have been Luis Emmanuel Ruiz Castillo, Noel López Olguín and technical engineer Rodolfo Ochoa Moreno. Meanwhile, Marco Antonio López has been missing since early last month.

From 2003 to date 10 journalists have been murdered in the state of Veracruz, with the majority of these cases not believed to be linked to their work as journalists. However, the authorities have not reported on the results of their investigations nor arrested anyone.