This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
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How did a journalist who knew she would be killed live?
By: []
Date: 2021-12
“I know they're going to kill me,” Regina Martínez told a friend's relative in 2012. Already that year eight other journalists had been murdered in her home state of Veracruz, Mexico. Her colleagues offered to move her to another house to protect her, but she declined. “I'm not afraid of them,” she said, including a string of profanities.
Regina carried on reporting despite constant threats. But she knew what she was risking: she hadn't been out at night for years, and in the week before her murder, stress gave her headaches and she went days without sleeping.
Her investigations revealed the never-ending corruption, organised crime and human rights violations that took place under five different state governments in Veracruz, the Gulf coast state where she suffered threats, covert surveillance and censorship during her decades-long career.
Her huge bravery contrasted starkly with her tiny stature – she was 148cm tall, just under five feet – and unthreatening style: she wore John Lennon-style glasses and was usually dressed in a brown waistcoat, jeans and hiking boots, with her unmistakable leather bag crossed over her chest.
Regina was a pioneer of investigative journalism under the dictatorship of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which lasted from 1946 to 2000. In that time, dissenters were silenced. That's how she met the current president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who led the Exodus for Democracy march in Veracruz in 1991. Thousands of people protested against fraud in the municipal elections, but were ignored by most media outlets. By contrast, Regina and Alberto Morales, her colleague in the newspaper Política, spent 15 days with López Obrador.
The freedom that any human being should have was taken away from Regina little by little, as it was from all Mexicans, in some areas worse than in others. The rampant violence of drug trafficking made the atmosphere very heavy in the country under President Felipe Calderon (2006-12), who inaugurated his term with the war on drugs.
Meanwhile, under state governors Fidel Herrera (2004-10) and Javier Duarte (2010-16), Veracruz became the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. Twenty-six reporters have been murdered and eight disappeared since 2000.
Fidelism, ‘my most desperate stage’
September 2009. Regina Martínez showed up to give me an interview about her dismissal from Política. Her case was emblematic of the repression during the six-year term of Herrera, which I studied as part of my master's research on the media in Veracruz.
She answered each question confidently, hesitating on only one, perhaps the simplest:
“Are you from Veracruz?”
“Mmm, yes,” she said in a low voice three seconds later.
Her reserve was part of her personality – it is still not clear when or where she was born. But it was also a defence against the constant attacks she had received during her journalistic career. Regina recalled some of those moments for me.
“In my 18 years of journalism, ‘Fidelism’ has been the most desperate period,” Regina told me, clenching her jaw as she talks about Herrera’s term.
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