Prominent journalist killed in Chihuahua

A correspondent for La Jornada in Mexico City and a journalist for Norte newspaper in Ciudad Juárez and El Diario de Chihuahua in northwestern state of Chihuahua, Miroslava Breach Velducea was shot dead today outside her home in Granjas neighborhood, Chihuahua.

The prominent 54-year-old journalist received four shots at point-blank as she was leaving home to apparently take her son to school this morning.

The recent violence surge in Chihuahua comes as a bitter pill to swallow, while current governor, Javier Corral Jurado, traveled on a private plane to Mazatlán Sinaloa last weekend, to play golf with his Sinaloa counterpart as reported by EL UNIVERSAL .

Jurado, from conservative National Action Party (PAN), has been severely criticized for his trip to prestigious El Cid golf course in Mazatlán, as at least 14 people where killed that very same weekend in the entity under his rule. Only last December, radio journalist Jesús Adrían Rodríguez was killed outside his home in Chihuahua.

U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Roberta Jacobson, expressed her condolences to the bereaved and hoped that violence against journalist will not remain unpunished in two posts from her twitter account:

“Our deepest sympathies to the family, colleagues and friends of journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea. #Chihuahua”

“May this and other crimes against journalists not remain unpunished and harm freedom of speech. #Chihuahua”

For its part, the plenum of the Mexican Senate observed a minute’s silence for Breach Velducea’s decease, while Patricio Martínez García, from the Institutional revolutionary Party (PRI) and a senator for Chihuahua, said that Breach Velducea was a journalism professional with an ideological conviction of great depth and underlined her work as a correspondent for La Jornada where she covered news related to human rights defense.

Senator Graciela Ortiz González (PRI) said that Breach Velducea integrity was unquestionable and that he paid a high price for her journalistic duty: “Miroslava Breach, journalist, correspondent for La Jornada, a prominent and respected journalist of Chihuahua, paid with her life a problem that has plagued my state: violence.”

The Attorney General of the state is already investigating the crime, while several journalist organizations brought together by the Organized Journalists Guild of Mexico have condemned the crime and demanded justice.

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