Lawyer who ran local news Facebook page killed in Mexico

A lawyer who ran a local news Facebook page in one of Mexico’s most violent states was found killed Friday, prosecutors in Guanajuato said.

The victim, Iran Villarreal Belmont, had run for the municipal council for the centrist Movimiento Ciudadano party in the city of San Luis de la Paz last year.

Police sources said he had been missing since Thursday, when armed men reportedly abducted him from an office.

He was found dead on the side of the road with bullet wounds on Friday morning, they said.

State prosecutors said in a statement they were treating his death in the category of “crimes committed against freedom of expression.”

Villarreal ran a Facebook page called “Observatorio Ciudadano” (Citizen Observatory), which had some 8,400 subscribers and published content about his city.

He was highly critical of mayor Ruben Urias, a member of the conservative National Action Party.

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

Guanajuato is a thriving industrial hub and home to several popular tourist destinations, but it is also considered Mexico’s most violent state, according to official homicide statistics.

Violence in Guanajuato is linked to ongoing conflict between the local Santa Rosa de Lima gang and the Jalisco New Generation cartel, one of the most powerful in the Latin American nation.

Drug-related violence has seen more than 480,000 people killed in Mexico since the government deployed the army to combat trafficking in 2006, according to official figures.