A journalist was found dead in Culiacán, Sinaloa, on Thursday, state authorities said.
The lifeless body of Luis Enrique Ramírez Ramos, director of the Sinaloa-focused news website Fuentes Fidedignas and a columnist for El Debate, was found on a dirt road on the south side of the state capital.
Sinaloa Attorney General Sara Bruna Quiñónez Estrada told a press conference that the body of the 59-year-old journalist was wrapped in black plastic.
The Attorney General’s Office (FGE) said in a statement that an autopsy determined that Ramírez had suffered a brain injury due to blows to the head. “There were no signs of torture, except for the blows to his head that caused his death,” it said.
The FGE said that Ramírez left his home at approximately 3 a.m. Thursday and members of his family didn’t hear from him after that. Fuentes Fidedignas reported that he was abducted near his Culiacán home.
The FGE said that an investigation into his murder had been opened and that it would consider motives related to his work as a journalist.
Ramírez, an award-winning journalist who contributed to some of Mexico’s leading newspapers during a 40-year career, received threats in 2010 and went into hiding after three of his friends were murdered. He said in a 2015 interview that he and his slain friends were all privy to sensitive information about former Sinaloa governor Mario López Valdez and ex-government secretary Gerardo Vargas Landeros, who is now mayor of Ahome, a coastal municipality in the north of the state.
Ramírez said that the threats he received came from the state government. Quiñónez Estrada noted that he had spoken of being intimidated in media interviews but had not made any complaint to the FGE.
A complaint he filed with the federal Attorney General’s Office got nowhere, the newspaper Reforma reported.
Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha, who took office for the Morena party in November, lamented the death of Ramírez, who he described as a friend. He said in a Twitter message that he had spoken to the attorney general and advocated an “immediate, rigorous and exhaustive investigation” into the crime.
Ramírez is the ninth journalist killed in 2022 and the 34th to be murdered since President López Obrador took office in December 2018.
With reports from Reforma
