There bodies were found dumped in plastic bags in a canal on Thursday, less than a week after a reporter for an investigative newsmagazine was beaten and strangled in her home in the same state, officials and colleagues say.
Press freedom groups said the three had temporarily fled the state after receiving threats last year.
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They called for immediate government action to halt attacks that have killed at least seven current and former reporters and photographers in Veracruz in 18 months.
Like most of the slain, the men found on Thursday had been among the few journalists left working on crime-related stories in the state.
Threats and killings have spawned an atmosphere of terror and self-censorship among the journalists of Veracruz, with most local media outlets too intimidated to report on drug-related violence, and social media and blogs the only outlets reporting on serious
crime.
Mexico has become one of the world's most dangerous countries for journalists in recent years, disproportionately targeted as a militarised government offensive against drug cartels and rivalry between criminal groups fuel tens of thousands of killings,
kidnappings and extortion.
Prosecutions in journalist killings are all but unknown, as is the case with almost all homicides and other serious crimes in Mexico.
The latest killings came in Boca del Rio, a town near the port city of Veracruz where police found the bodies of four people on Thursday after passers-by spotted four suspicious black plastic bags in a wastewater canal, the Veracruz state attorney general's
Office said.
The bodies, pulled from the canal by police boats, bore signs of torture and had been dismembered, the prosecutor's office said.
One victim was identified as Guillermo Luna Varela, a crime-news photographer for the website www.veracruznews.com.mx who was last
seen covering a car accident on Wednesday afternoon.
According to a colleague Luna was in his 20s and had begun his career working for the local newspaper Notiver.
The journalist said Luna was the nephew of another victim, Gabriel Huge, who was in his early 30s and worked as a photojournalist for Notiver until he fled the state soon after two of the paper's reporters were slain in still-unsolved killings.
Huge had returned to the state to work as a reporter, but it was not immediately clear what kind of stories he had been covering.
State officials said the third victim was Esteban Rodriguez, who was a photographer for the local newspaper AZ until he fled the state. He later returned, but took up work as a welder.
The London-based press freedom group Article 19 said he, like the other two, had been a crime photographer.
The fourth victim was Luna's girlfriend, Irasema Becerra, state prosecutors said.
Veracruz is a common route for drugs and migrants coming from the south on the way up to the US.
