The decapitated body of Mexican journalist Moises Sanchez has been recovered. The journalist, who reported on political corruption and drug related violence for the weekly newspaper La Union in the town of Medellin de Bravo, had been missing for three weeks.

Mr. Sanchez was taken from his home in the eastern state of Veracruz by gunmen on Jan. 2, BBC reports. According to Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights, Veracruz, is among the most dangerous Mexican states for investigative journalists to work in.

Veracruz state prosecutor Luis Angel Bravo said Sanchez's headless corpse was found Saturday on the outskirts of Medellin de Bravo.

The prosecutor explained that an ex-police officer confessed to taking part in Mr Sanchez's execution. Bravo fleshed out the scenario by illustration how this ex cop acted on orders coming from the local Mayor Omar Cruz. Mayor Omar Cruz has remained silent regarding the allegations and as mayor is in fact immune from any actual prosecution.

This case shares striking similarities with the case of the 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College of Ayotzinapa who went missing in Iguala, Guerrero in September. Investigators in the Iguala case have declared that municipal police officers confessed to working with a cartel, handing the students over to a drug gang, who then killed them.

In a similar fashion to what the officer in the case of Sanchez is being accused of, the municipal police officers in Iguala were supposedly simply taking orders from the town's mayor, Jose Luis Abarca. The ousted mayor denies the charges. He is currently being held in a high-security jail in Mexico City.

The disappearance of the missing 43 students set forth a series of protests by Mexicans who know that they have had it with political corruption and the symbiotic relationship that seems to exist between local authorities, the police, and drug gangs.