A murder in Veracruz: Slain journalist’s story a portrait of a violent, corrupt era in Mexico

By Dana Priest, Paloma de Dinechin, Nina Lakhani and Veronica Espinosa-Dec. 6, 2020

XALAPA, Mexico — Regina Martínez’s death was brutal. Someone broke in through the metal door from her beloved garden patio, the tiny patch of tranquility that kept her from moving from her modest cinder-block home to a safer location.

The intruder probably surprised her in the bathroom, from behind, investigators believe. At barely 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, she scratched and struggled to fight off her attacker, leaving skin under her fingernails. The assailant broke her jaw with brass knuckles, then wrapped a rag around her neck, squeezing the life out of the region’s best hope for accountability and justice.

In articles for the national investigative weekly Proceso, Martínez, who was killed at age 48, told her readers that two successive governors in her home state of Veracruz looted the treasury and allowed cartels to operate freely with the help of local and state police. She sought to prove the traffickers and their accomplices had executed hundreds of people: Teenage dealers and entire families. Farmers and politicians. Even young women who attended their sex parties.

Martínez was one of the very few reporters who dared to refuse bribes or to ignore cartel threats aimed at censoring the news. Her articles had an outsize impact.

“What the local press did not want to publish was published through Regina Martínez,” said Jorge Carrasco, Proceso’s editor in chief.

At least 27 journalists have been killed in the state of Veracruz since 2003. Eight others have disappeared. International press groups consider Veracruz to be the most dangerous place in the world to report the news.

“It has been a relentless attack against journalists,” said Roberta S. Jacobson, U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2016 to 2018. “They were forced out of the field of play. . . . It’s really amazing, their bravery.”

Eight years after Martínez’s homicide on April 28, 2012, a team of reporters from Mexico, Europe and The Washington Post has picked up where Martínez left off. The team continued her investigations of the two state governors — Fidel Herrera and Javier Duarte — and examined her homicide inquiry. Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit group based in Paris that is dedicated to continuing the work of journalists silenced by homicide, organized the effort.

LEFT: Writer and journalist Elena Poniatowska holds a photo of Regina Martínez during a 2017 protest in Mexico City calling for an end to violence against journalists. (Miguel Tovar/LatinContent/Getty Images) RIGHT: Martínez’s gravesite in Xalapa, Mexico. (Forbidden Stories)

The story of Martínez’s death and her work is the first of a five-part series, “The Cartel Project,” which involved 60 journalists from 25 media outlets. It is being published by Forbidden Stories and its partners beginning today.

The team of reporters discovered that law enforcement authorities in Mexico, the United States and Spain had opened inquiries into allegations that Herrera colluded with leaders of the Zeta cartel while he was governor and took money from them for his campaign, as well as allegations that he was involved in money laundering while later serving in a diplomatic post in Barcelona.

The Cartel Project

This is the first in a series of five articles, called "The Cartel Project," involving 60 journalists from 18 countries. The international collaboration was organized by Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit group based in Paris whose mission is to continue the reporting of murdered journalists. The series examines the power and activities of Mexican cartels and their collusion with corrupt government officials. The four other parts can be found at forbiddenstories.org.

Only the inquiry in Spain is known to be closed. Mexican and U.S. authorities declined to say whether their investigations are still active. Herrera has not been charged with a crime, and he denied all the allegations against him. Duarte is serving a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and money laundering.

Herrera did not respond to emails to his office. His son, Javier, said via Twitter that his father was ill and unable to comment: “My father has been in a hospital since April; this is a fact that you can easily corroborate; he suffered a stroke in April and has been in intensive care ever since. He has not seen the questions, it is medically prohibited by his doctor.”

The then-governor of Veracruz state, Javier Duarte, after a 2017 extradition hearing in Guatemala City. (Johan Ordóñez/AFP/Getty Images)

Laura Borbolla, a senior prosecutor in the Mexican Attorney General’s Office who investigated Martínez’s homicide in 2012, said in interviews that state police and prosecutors made serious mistakes in their handling of the case. She also pointed to evidence that the man convicted in Martínez’s killing was tortured by Veracruz police and falsely confessed to the crime.

“The justice system in Veracruz is rubbish,” Borbolla said in her most extensive comments about the case to date. “Never in my career had I seen such an altered crime scene. . . . We may never know who killed Regina, but I know who didn’t kill Regina.”

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a news conference in November that he would ask that the homicide case be reexamined. “I knew her quite well,” he said of Martínez, who had covered one of his earlier campaigns. “She was an incorruptible, professional journalist.”

Martínez is one of 119 journalists and media staffers killed throughout Mexico since 2000, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Her story offers a singular account of Mexico’s deterioration by 2020 into an anguished nation, beset by cartel-corrupted government institutions and haunted by thousands of killings and disappearances.

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