Police officers stand near the vehicle of journalist Antonio de la Cruz, who was killed by unknown assailants while leaving his home, in Ciudad Victoria, in Tamaulipas state, Mexico June 29, 2022.STRINGER/Reuters
The daughter of a reporter slain earlier this week in the northern Mexico border state of Tamaulipas died Friday of wounds suffered in the attack that killed her father.
On Wednesday, Antonio de la Cruz became the 12th journalist killed so far this year in Mexico, when a man on a motorcycle fired at him in his car outside his home. His daughter Cinthya de la Cruz Martinez, 23, was with him in the vehicle and was also shot.
On Friday, the newspaper Mr. de la Cruz worked for, Expreso, reported that the daughter had died of her injuries at a hospital in Ciudad Victoria, where the attack occurred. She had suffered a bullet wound to the head, according to the newspaper.
Also Friday, the Governor of the western state of Jalisco said the director of a university radio station in the coastal city of Puerto Vallarta had been stabbed in what he described as an attempted robbery.
Governor Enrique Alfaro said Susanna Carreno was in stable condition after undergoing surgery.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Thursday that federal prosecutors have taken over the investigation of the killing of Mr. de la Cruz as a crime against freedom of expression.
One of the reporter’s colleagues said Mr. de la Cruz had once been asked, apparently by state authorities, to remove some of his tweets.
“On Twitter, Antonio criticized the state government a lot and criticized the government,” said fellow reporter Carlos Manuel Juarez. “He even told me at one point that they had asked him to take down some critical tweets that he put up.”
Mr. de la Cruz, 47, was a reporter for the local newspaper Expreso for almost three decades.
“This is clearly an attack on freedom of expression,” said Expreso’s director, Miguel Dominguez.
Almost all of Tamaulipas’s recent governors have faced accusations of corruption, ranging from money laundering to aiding drug cartels.
Expreso has been targeted over the years. In 2012, one of the worst years of drug cartel violence, a car bomb exploded in front of the newspaper’s building. 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.
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