Photojournalists Murdered in Mexico

Somebody in Mexico's Veracruz state has declared war on news photographers. The dismembered bodies of three photojournalists from different news organizations were found in plastic bags in a canal yesterday—World Press Freedom Day—along with the body of one photographer's girlfriend, AP reports. All the bodies bore sign of torture. The corpses were found just days after an investigative reporter was found strangled in her home elsewhere in the state.

The three murdered men were among the handful of people still reporting on crime in Veracruz, and were among a group of journalists who fled the state last year because of reluctance by officials to investigate threats against them. After several journalists were murdered in the state last year, news coverage of crime and corruption all but disappeared out of fear of upsetting the Zetas cartel. "Self-censorship was extraordinarily strong, but whoever killed these journalists wanted more," says the Mexico representative for the Committee to Protect Journalists. (More Zetas stories.)