A poet who led protests against the unsolved killings of women in the violent border city of Ciudad Juarez has herself become the victim of a bizarre slaying, her body found strangled and her left hand severed after a night of partying with three teens.

The body of Susana Chavez, 36, was left last week in the center of the city but was not identified until Tuesday, authorities said Wednesday. Her head was covered with a bag, and the cause of death was strangulation.

Three suspects, all 17, are in custody, including a neighbor, who told investigators that they had gotten into an argument with Chavez. Because they were intoxicated, they found it "easy" to kill her, said Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Attorney General of the Northern Zone of Mexico.

The teens decided to cut off her hand to make it look as if her death were linked to organized crime, Sandoval said.

The city across from El Paso, Texas, has been plagued by rampant drug violence, setting a record of more than 3,000 killings in 2010.

The killing was the result of an "unfortunate encounter" and had nothing to do with Chavez's activism, said Chihuahua state Attorney General Carlos Manuel Salas in an interview with the Televisa network.

Chavez, a prominent writer and activist, helped popularize the slogan "Not One More Death" to bring attention to the killings of hundreds of Juarez women, who were raped, strangled and dumped in the desert over a decade, starting in 1993.

She had been active with May Our Daughters Return Home, an organization comprised of family members and friends of the slain women.

She is the second Juarez anti-crime activist killed in less than a month. Gunmen shot Marisela Escobedo Ortiz as she protested in front of a governor's office in the state capital of Chihuahua in December to demand justice for dead daughter, whose suspected killer was an ex-boyfriend freed by a panel of judges for lack of evidence.

Lawmakers in the Mexican state of Chihuahua on Tuesday voted unanimously to impeach the three judges who freed the main suspect in Ortiz's death.

Source: Journal-news.com