Journalist and former mayoral candidate murdered in Mexico

The director of an independent news website and former councilman candidate was murdered in the central state of Guanajuato, one of the most violent in Mexico, the local prosecutor's office announced.

Irán Villarreal Belmont, who was a lawyer by profession and aspired last year to the post of alderman of the municipality of San Luis de la Paz for the Movimiento Ciudadano party (center), served as an activist and director of the Facebook page Observatorio Ciudadano, with more than 8,400 followers.

According to police sources, the man had been missing since Thursday night, when armed individuals reportedly subdued and abducted him from an office. On Friday Villarreal was found dead on the side of a road with gunshot wounds to his body, authorities said.

The Guanajuato prosecutor's office said it is investigating the crime under the protocol of "crimes committed against freedom of expression," according to a press release.

Villarreal disseminated content and published videos analyzing his municipality, and made harsh criticisms against the current mayor, Rubén Urías, of the National Action Party (right), which has in the state of Guanajuato one of its political strongholds.

The Movimiento Ciudadano party issued a statement demanding that state authorities consider Villarreal's journalistic work "as a priority line of investigation."

Guanajuato was the state with the highest number of homicides in 2024

At the beginning of last week, the communicator Kristian Uriel Martínez Zavala, who ran a Facebook news page, was also murdered in Guanajuato, while last February 23 an armed group killed eight people in the same state.

The state, a thriving industrial and tourist center with assembly plants such as Mazda and Toyota, is also the scene of clashes between the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, and the Cártel de Santa Rosa de Lima.

In 2024, Guanajuato was the state with the highest number of homicides, with 3,151, 10.5% of the murders that year in the entire country, according to official figures.

Since December 2006, when a controversial military anti-drug operation was launched, Mexico has accumulated almost 480,000 violent deaths and some 110,000 disappeared.