Daughter of slain Mexico reporter dies of wounds from attack that killed her father

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 Martínez, 23, was with him in the vehicle and was also shot.

On Friday, the newspaper 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.

Gov. Enrique Alfaro said Susanna Carreño was in stable condition after undergoing surgery.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Thursday that federal prosecutors have taken over the investigation of the killing of de la Cruz as a crime against freedom of expression.

One of the reporter’s colleagues said 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 Juárez. “He even told me at one point that they had asked him to take down some critical tweets that he put up.”

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 Domínguez.

Almost all of Tamaulipas’ 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.

Other reporters killed in Mexico in 2022

In May, two colleagues at a news site were shot to death in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz. The Veracruz State Prosecutor’s Office said it was investigating the killings of Yessenia Mollinedo Falconi and Sheila Johana García Olivera, the director and a reporter, respectively, of the online news site El Veraz in Cosoleacaque.

In March, prosecutors in the western state of Michoacan said reporter Armando Linares was shot to death at a home in the town of Zitacuaro. His killing came six weeks after the slaying of a colleague, Roberto Toledo, from the same outlet, Monitor Michoacan. It was Linares who announced Toledo’s death Jan. 31 in a video posted to social media.

In early March, gunmen killed Juan Carlos Muñiz, who covered crime for the online news site Testigo Minero in the state of Zacatecas.

Jorge Camero, the director of an online news site who was until recently a municipal worker in the northern state of Sonora, was killed in late February.

In early February, Heber López, director of the online news site Noticias Web, was shot to death in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Reporter Lourdes Maldonado López was found shot to death inside her car in Tijuana on Jan. 23. In a news conference in 2019, Maldonado Lopez told Mexico’s president she feared for her life.

Reporter José Luis Gamboa was killed in the Gulf coast state of Veracruz on Jan. 10.

Crime photographer Margarito Martínez was gunned down outside his Tijuana home on Jan. 17.  Guillermo Arias, whose photographs chronicle life and death in the streets of Tijuana, worked with Martinez for many years.

He recalled the painful experience of covering the murder of his friend and fellow journalist.

“His daughter arrived and asked me not to photograph her dad’s body,” Arias told CBS News.