Regina Martínez was a doggedly troublesome reporter for Veracruz officials, in a state where journalists claim a call from a senior state official will get a reporter fired.
The following is a CPJ Blog post by Mike O’Connor, CPJ Mexico Representative:
He certainly looked guilty of something, and as if he’d finally been caught. With either his head down or with a kind of scared, dead-eyed stare, in a white jumpsuit, in front of the four Veracruz state police officers crowded behind him. They were all in black uniforms, with a strip of face and eyes showing through black masks, with four matte black assault rifles menacingly at the ready to guard a slim man in handcuffs. (Actually, had there been any gunfire, the police were so over-armed and so close together that it’s likely one of them would have been the first victim.) Still, it all looked good for the cameras and reporters summoned to hear about the man’s arrest and the end of a most doggedly troublesome case for state officials: the murder of Regina Martínez Pérez on April 28 last year.
It was Regina Martínez who was a doggedly troublesome reporter for state officials. She was the local correspondent for Proceso, Mexico’s leading national news magazine. It verges to the left politically but toward the throats of politicians around the country. In the capital city of Veracruz, Xalapa, Martínez was known among her colleagues as not only the most irksome reporter for officials but as the mentor of a group of about half a dozen younger reporters who were learning to be a bother and get away with it -not easy in a state where journalists claim a call from a senior state official will get a reporter fired. (The state spokeswoman denies this emphatically in press interviews, though she has not spoken with CPJ.) Even reporters not in Martínez’s cadre kept an eye on what she did, some of them told CPJ. It was an example.
Read the full story on CPJ’s website
