The decapitation of newspaper editor María Elizabeth Macías marks yet another escalation in the attempt of drug cartels to silence the media in Mexico.
Her butchered corpse was dumped in a park and her head was placed on top of a nearby stone pillar.
Next to Macías's blood-drenched body was a note, crudely written in black marker pen, which said:
"Nuevo Laredo Live and [other] social networking sites, I'm the 'Laredo Girl' and I'm here because of my reports, and yours.
For those who don't want to believe, this happened to me because of my actions, for believing in the army and the navy. Thank you for your attention, respectfully, Laredo Girl … ZZZz."
This was a reference to her blogging pseudonym, "La Nena de Nuevo Laredo", which she used to report on social networks about organised crime in her region, Nuevo Laredo, in the eastern state of Tamaulipas.
Macías, 39, was editor of Primera Hora, a local daily paper. She was the fourth woman journalist to be murdered in Mexico since the start of the year.
The previous three women victims were former Televisa reporter Rocio González Trápaga and Ana María Marcela Yarce Viveros, the editor of the weekly magazine Contralínea, who were killed together in the capital on 31 August, and columnist Yolanda Ordaz de la Cruz of the regional daily Notiver, who was murdered in the eastern state of Veracruz on 26 July.
The message left by Macías's body echoes similar messages left by the bodies of social network users who dare to talk about drug trafficking.
Two bodies bearing the marks of torture were hung from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo on 13 September.
Sources: Reporters Without Borders/Financial Times
