A statement from the Yucatán state attorney general said a man has been detained in connection with the death of Barbara McClatchie Andrews, a Canadian photographer and artist who was found strangled Friday outside Mérida.
The suspect is a driver who was hired to take her from the resort of Cancún back to Mérida, the colonial city where she lived.
Yucatán state Attorney General Ariel Aldecua said the motive appears to have been robbery.
McClatchie-Andrews, 74, 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 travelled.
“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 she 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, Jill Slattery and Rebecca Joseph