U.S. Reporter’s Body Found in Deep Ravine in Mexico

The body of a missing American reporter was found Wednesday in a ravine in western Mexico, a U.S. consular official said.

Philip True, who worked for the San Antonio Express-News, apparently slipped and fell to his death in a deep ravine in a remote mountain range on the border between Jalisco and Nayarit states, a spokesperson at the Guadalajara consulate said.

“We all mourn the loss of a colleague and an outstanding journalist,” W. Lawrence Walker Jr., publisher and chief executive of the Express-News, told staff members gathered in the newspaper’s newsroom Wednesday.

True’s body was spotted by one of several army aircraft sweeping the area, military officials said. It took soldiers hours to reach the isolated Chapangana Canyon in the western Sierra Madre and several hours more to identify the body.

True, a 50-year-old reporter who was based in Mexico City, headed into the Sierra Madre Occidental range Nov. 29 to photograph and write about the region’s Huichol Indians.

He had planned to hike into neighboring Nayarit state and return to Mexico City last Thursday. Since then, the Mexican army and authorities from both states had been searching the region.

Military officials said a medical examiner was viewing the body, but details about where it would be taken and other arrangements were not immediately known.

True worked for the Brownsville Herald in Texas before joining the Express-News staff in 1992 as the newspaper’s border correspondent based in Laredo. He became the Express-News correspondent in Mexico City in January 1996.