Monterrey TV personality is abducted, slain

Two others kidnapped with ‘La Gata' are killed; motive said to be unclear.

By Dudley Althaus
dudley.althaus@chron.com

MEXICO CITY — Gunmen abducted and killed a comic sidekick on a popular Monterrey television show shortly after Mexican President Felipe Calderón warned a gathering of the industrial city's business executives that a criminal cancer had been allowed to flourish there.

The body of Jose Luis Cerda, 33, was identified just after sunrise Friday in a Monterrey suburb. He was shot in the head. Two men kidnapped along with Cerda, identified in the Monterrey media as his cousin and a freelance videographer, were found dead on a nearby highway.

Cerda, widely known by his nickname “La Gata,” had a secondary role on “The Club,” an afternoon variety show that provides dancing, singing and comedy skits. Dressed as a kid from a poor neighborhood, or a gang member, he served as a comic foil for the show's bigger stars.

Investigators did not immediately offer a motive for Cerda's murder. But the state attorney general for Nuevo León told reporters that the killing was not seen as a warning to either his employer or the Mexican media.

Though he was never involved in news programming, Cerda is the latest of scores of Mexican media workers to be targeted by gangsters. Several local stations of Televisa, for which he worked, have been attacked in northeastern Mexico in recent months.

Cerda and his companions were snatched about 8 p.m. Thursday as they were leaving the studios of the Televisa network, Mexico's largest, in central Monterrey. An anonymous call led reporters Friday morning to where Cerda's body was dumped. But shortly afterward, armed men swooped down on the site, shooed police and the media away, and carried Cerda's body off.

Police recovered the body again late Friday afternoon in a luxury automobile abandoned on a main highway in the center of Monterrey.

Cerda's abduction came on Thursday, the day that Televisa and scores of other Mexican media companies announced an agreement on guidelines in dealing with gangland violence so as not to be used as tools of the gangsters. And it came just after Calderón warned in a forum on public security that Monterrey had allowed organized criminal gangs to sink their fangs deep into the city's police forces and society.

“It's unseemly for a government, in order not to make noise, to leave citizens in the criminals' hands,” Calderón told the 1,300 business executives. “They must be confronted. And it must be done forcefully.”

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