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 MartÃnez 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 wonât judge the change until he meets this week with the countryâs 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 Silvaâs 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 Silvaâs complaints that he had been tortured into confessing.
At Christmas that year, I ran into the Committee to Protect Journalistsâ Mike OâConnor at a party. He had written several articles about Reginaâs 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, OâConnor died in his sleep of an apparent heart attack.
OâConnor himself had a strange experience when he went to Xalapa to investigate Reginaâs murder. Someone entered his hotel room as he slept and left a box of chocolates in the drawer where he had put his reportersâ notebooks. He took this as a message that he was being watched and probably an attempt to scare him. It didnât work with OâConnor, 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, OâConnor said, âI ate them, cabrón!â
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 teacherâs 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 Reginaâs 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 GarcÃa, Polo Hernández, and Eddie Romo to see if they would be willing to meet me and hear my idea. Reginaâs inner circle didnât give interviews or participate in the commemorative marches that had occurred over the years.
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