By Alejandro Martínez
The founder of the popular Mexican website Blog del Narco has fled the country after a colleague that helped her administer the site went missing, reported newspaper The Guardian.
The author, who in an interview last month identified herself with the pseudonym "Lucy" and revealed she was a young female journalist living in Northern Mexico, left to the U.S. and then to Spain after her colleague called her on the phone last week and just said, "Run."
"I'm trying to think positively but I'm scared something terrible has happened. 'Run' was our codeword for when something was very wrong. We had never used it before," told Lucy to the Brtish daily.
Lucy said she hasn't updated the site since May 3 and has no plans to continue blogging.
Blog del Narco presents articles and uncensored images of the drug violence in Mexico that few others have published. The site has been lauded as "the most important website in Mexico" but has also been criticized for allegedly serving as a platform for drug traffickers to send messages to each other, and for plagiarizing stories.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.