The assassination of Regina Martinez in 2012 was horrific: a respected Mexican investigative journalist was brutally beaten in her home before being killed. But it was the context surrounding her death that was especially distressing: 10 journalists had been killed in Mexico in 2010 alone; Martinez was the fifth killed in the state of Veracruz since Javier Duarte became governor in 2011. (Duarte is now in prison for embezzling billions of dollars.) The government’s investigation into the journalist’s death was clearly a sham, built on propaganda and false arrests.
Most Americans are unaware of tragedies like this one. Or if they heard about this one back then, they presumed it was just another case of drug cartel violence. Katherine Corcoran’s new book, “In the Mouth of the Wolf,” aims to uncover the truth behind Martinez’s murder while also underscoring the larger implications for civil society — and not just in Mexico.
Corcoran was the Associated Press regional bureau chief based in Mexico City in 2012. While she’d only briefly encountered Martinez, she was familiar with her work and knew that the killing of a journalist of her national reputation was a step beyond even for Mexico — even for Veracruz under Duarte.
“My first motivation for investigating this was that there were so many unanswered questions around these journalist killings, and I thought I could clarify more definitively what was behind them,” Corcoran said in a recent video interview from Indiana, where she’d been speaking at the University of Notre Dame, her alma mater. (She still spends most of her time in Mexico City.) “It was only getting worse, and I thought the only thing I can do as a foreign journalist is bring the story to a wider audience. Maybe that would cause more concern in Mexico.”
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Source: LA Times
