In the Mouth of the Wolf by Katherine Corcoran

Author:Katherine Corcoran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

PART III

CHAPTER 13

Arrancando Motores

When Jorge was threatened in early 2013, I was far afield of the Regina Martínez case. We were preoccupied with the changes in U.S.-Mexico relations under new president Enrique Peña Nieto:

Mexico is ending the widespread access it gave to U.S. security agencies in the name of fighting drug trafficking and organized crime, but President Barack Obama said Tuesday he won’t judge the change until he meets this week with the country’s new leader.

This was the lead paragraph to one of my stories as Jorge Carrasco was fleeing the country.

I did notice one development in the case out of the corner of my eye: El Silva’s sentence was thrown out in August of that year because a court ruled that his human rights had been violated in the legal process. Two of three magistrates in the Veracruz Superior Court voted to overturn the conviction based on El Silva’s complaints that he had been tortured into confessing.

At Christmas that year, I ran into the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Mike O’Connor at a party. He had written several articles about Regina’s case, and I told him I was interested in discussing it with him. We made plans to have lunch over the holidays, but a head cold made me cancel. We rescheduled for the first week of January 2014. On December 29, 2013, O’Connor died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack.

O’Connor himself had a strange experience when he went to Xalapa to investigate Regina’s murder. Someone entered his hotel room as he slept and left a box of chocolates in the drawer where he had put his reporters’ notebooks. He took this as a message that he was being watched and probably an attempt to scare him. It didn’t work with O’Connor, who had covered wars in Central America and the Balkans. When Rodrigo Soberanes asked him, wide-eyed, what he did when he found the chocolates, O’Connor said, “I ate them, cabrón!”

Rodrigo loved to tell that story over and over.

Again, I got distracted by the rotary cannon spray of news coming out of Mexico and Central America at the time. Twenty fourteen was the year that forty-three teacher’s college students disappeared and that the Mexican Army massacred as many as twenty people who had already surrendered.

In 2015, I finally decided to take up Regina’s case in earnest. After five years, my job as bureau chief was coming to an end. The AP, like the military, rotated its troops around the world based on specific assignments, and it liked to see you keep moving. As I was looking around for other opportunities, I became a reporter again.

Rodrigo Soberanes had worked for me for a while by then, as a Veracruz correspondent, and we had developed a good rapport. When I asked him about exploring the case, he said he would consult his friends Lev García, Polo Hernández, and Eddie Romo to see if they would be willing to meet me and hear my idea. Regina’s inner circle didn’t give interviews or participate in the commemorative marches that had occurred over the years.

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