MEXICO CITY – Nine employees from two Mexican polling companies have been freed after disappearing over the weekend in a violence-plagued area of western Mexico, their employers said.

A spokesperson for Parametria polling company told AFP that three of its employees were in Mexico City on Aug. 3, two days after they went missing, without immediately giving more details.

Earlier, Roy Campos, director general of Mitofsky polling company, said that six of his employees, who disappeared over the weekend, had also been found.

“The six pollsters from Mitofsky are well, are healthy, have not been beaten,” Campos told MVS radio, without giving details of what had happened to them.

The pollsters disappeared in the city of Apatzingán, in Michoacán state, where the Knights Templar and La Familia drug gangs are known to operate.

They had been gathering information ahead of the November 13 gubernatorial polls. Their disappearance raised fears of threats from drug gangs to the electoral process.

A spokesman from the state attorney general’s office said on Aug. 1 that authorities had opened a kidnapping investigation.

[AFP, 04/08/2011]