“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.
