A 74-year-old Canadian woman was killed near the capital of the Yucatán state, a Mexican official has confirmed.
State prosecutor spokesman Baruch Velasquez identified the Canadian as Barbara McClatchie-Andrews.
According to a statement from the Yucatán state prosecutor, her remains were found Friday morning by the highway connecting Mérida and Cancún.
The statement said the victim had been strangled to death.
Global Affairs said in a statement they are in contact with local authorities and are providing assistance to the family of the victim.
McClatchie-Andrews was a photographer who had lived in Mérida for more than a decade. She was the director of the Galería In La K’ech in Mérida and a National Geographic photographer.
McClatchie-Andrews earned her undergraduate degree from the University of British Columbia and her work is sold by an art gallery in Downtown Vancouver.
“Barbara was one of the nicest, kindest people I’ve known,” Art Works Gallery president Deanna Geisheimer said. “She will definitely be sorely missed.
“Her work had a very painterly quality to it. A lot of people would look at it and not realize that they were photographs because they had a real abstracted quality to them. She had an eye for taking the unusual to making it beautiful.”
McClatchie-Andrews was also a teacher at South Delta Secondary and lived in Tsawwassen for some time.
Her friend Kit Grauer said she would take off summers while teaching and travel “to the most unusual places in the world, places where very few of the rest of us would dare to go on our own.”
Grauer added that McClatchie-Andrews was a social rights activist and would document people’s difficult stories from wherever she traveled.
“She tried very hard to get at some important issues through her work.”
Mexico felt like home to McClatchie-Andrews, Grauer said, and she had “a lot of respect for the Mexican people, especially the Mayan people.”
“It is just incredibly tragic that that is where she would lose her life.”
According to Grauer,McClatchie-Andrews believed Mérida was extremely safe and was ingrained in the community there. When she wasn’t away, she spent about 150 days a year in the Vancouver area.
-With files from The Canadian Press and Rebecca Joseph