Miami (May 26, 2009)–The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) condemned the murder of Mexican journalist Eliseo Barrón Hernández, whose body was found following his abduction on Monday, and called for a speedy investigation to identify the persons responsible and bring them to justice.

IAPA President Enrique Santos Calderón urged the Mexican government “to demonstrate greater political will and dedication to bring a halt to violence and the impunity surrounding it.”

Speaking from Bolivia, where he is heading an IAPA delegation, Santos Calderón offered his sympathy to the journalist’s family and colleagues.

For the past eleven years Barrón Hernández covered the police beat for the newspaper La Opinión Milenio in Torreón, in the northern state of Coahuila. According to several local media sources the veteran journalist was kidnapped by approximately eight masked men who forcefully abducted him from in front of his wife and young children shortly after 8:00 p.m. at his home in the town of Gómez Palacio, in the neighboring state of Durango. His gunshot body was found yesterday morning in a field nearby. 

Although the motives for the killing were not immediately known, Barrón Hernández's newspaper said that he had recently been reporting on an internal dispute in the Torreón Municipal Public Safety Office where 302 police officers were fired for corruption, many are currently under investigation for alleged offenses, including extortion and abuse of authority.

Santos Calderón, editor of the Bogotá, Colombia, newspaper El Tiempo, added, “Violence in Mexico has escalated unchecked. What is needed, and what we have been pressing for, is for the government to intensify its defense of the press and its work.”

Also murdered early this month in Durango was journalist Carlos Ortega Melo Semper; in February this year Luis Daniel Méndez Hernández was killed in Veracruz and Jean Paul Ibarra Ramírez in Guerrero.