Mexican actor gunned down at school while waiting for son

A Mexican actor was shot dead outside a sporting complex where she had gone to pick up her son earlier this week.

Tania Mendoza, 42, was standing with other parents outside the sporting complex in Cuernavaca city to pick up her 11-year-old son on Tuesday when two armed men arrived on a motorbike.

One of the men shot her multiple times before the two escaped, reported BBC News.

Authorities have not yet made any arrests in the case though the police conducted searches after Mendoza’s killing. They have not ascertained a motive for the shooting either.

Mendoza, who was also a singer, was kidnapped in 2010 with her husband and son, who was six months old at the time. Subsequently, she reported to the Morelos State attorney general’s office that she had received death threats on several occasions.

With no arrests and no motives found yet, the attorney general’s office said that the killing will be investigated as femicide, without giving any further details, reported Efe news agency.

Mendoza rose to prominence through her lead role in the film La Mera Reyna del Sur in 2005, and has also appeared in several soap operas.

In recent years, she recorded five albums as she focused on her career as a singer.

Mexico has long grappled with gender-based violence. Last year, thousands of Mexican women took to the streets to protest against violence and femicides.

The case has put the spotlight once again on the intentional murder of women in Mexico, which Amnesty International has termed as a “shocking epidemic”.

In September, Amnesty said that 10 women were murdered every day in Mexico last year.

An Amnesty report revealed that in 2020, there were 3,723 murders of women in Mexico, of which 940 were investigated as femicides.

“Around a third of victims were killed for reasons relating to their gender,” the report said.

“The shocking epidemic of disappearances and femicides in Mexico continue to go largely uninvestigated by the country’s authorities, hampering the judicial process and making it increasingly likely that perpetrators will remain unpunished,” Amnesty said in a statement. (Agency report)