translated from Spanish: Harassment against Miroslava Breach before his murder

Miroslava Breach has been under constant harassment since March 2016, when she began to be pressured by her publications on the links between drug trafficking groups and their policy listings. She warned of her threats to her old friend Javier Corral, newly elected governor of Chihuahua, and to federally charged with the mechanism to protect journalists. The Collective 23 March, formed by Mexican journalists, in collaboration with international organizations Forbidden Stories, Bellingcat And the Latin American Center for Journalism Research (CLIP), he reconstructed the plot of threats linked to his publications, the warnings he was in, and the clues he left in his publications before his murder on March 23, 2017, that the authorities did not deepen.
Before the assassination, a grey Malibu roamed on José María Mata Street, in the colony of Granjas, in the city of Chihuahua. Surveillance cameras searched him six times between March 21 and 22, 2017, as he passed in front of the now infamous two-story house. It was in the garage of that number 1609, with its brown bars and a front yard full of plants, that a man shot eight shots at journalist Miroslava Breach Velducea, on the morning of March 23, while waiting for his son to take him to school. 
Miroslava project: the clues to the journalist’s murder that were not investigated
A few days before his death, one of his four sisters visited and remembers that on the afternoon of March 20, as they together unloaded plants from Miroslava’s cherry van, their eyes crossed their eyes with a man walking on the sidewalk. A shiver crossed his body. When he heard about the murder, he understood that his sister was under close surveillance. 
The veteran national newspaper correspondent The Day, and author of the sharp political columns she published The North of Ciudad Juarez had become accustomed to living under harassment from what he published. No one has been able to establish how many intimidating messages he received until the day of his murder. 
Months before his murder, his relatives and close friends began to notice that he frequently mentioned the possibility of his death. The family had already become accustomed to her bare reports and she had received threatening messages that she seemed to give them no importance to. But as of December 2017 he did abnormal things like asking for the quote to shield the glass in his truck. She also told her sisters how her inheritance should be divided between her two children – a twentysomething and a 14-year-old teenager – she talked about her life insurance and who should take care of the child if she was missing. 
Some colleagues mentioned to this Collective that her last months heard her question whether she should leave the trade and devote herself to cooking, as she enjoyed, but she herself was interrupted and ended up talking about plans to strengthen her news agency mir or repeating that he couldn’t leave the profession because, he said, “someone has to say things.” 
Her older sister, Rosa Maria, recalls asking Miroslava not to tell of her threats if she was not willing to do something to take care of herself. Something like informing his old friend Javier Corral, the former senator, who at the end of 2016 had just become governor of Chihuahua for the PAN. 
Prohibited topics
The harassment against Miroslava Breach Velducea began a year before his death specifically when he reported the displacements by violence in the Sierra Tarahumara. The threats began on March 4, 2016 in which he published a report – in coordination with The Process correspondent, Patricia Mayorga, as a protective measure – on the strategy of various criminal groups to impose candidates on presidents Municipal. With their denunciations they knocked down two candidates of the PRI, one of them was the candidate of Chinipas, Juan Salazar Ochoa, nephew of the founders of an armed group that controls an important strip south of the Sierra Tarahumara adjoining Sonora called Los Salazares. 
As Miroslava was born in Chinipas and raised in Navojoa, Sonora, she knew very well the group of Los Salazares, because they were also originally from that same land and had expanded their businesses south of Sonora. They were a large family that ranchers became partners in the Sinaloa Cartel and two of its members were among the most wanted by the American anti-narcotics agency, the DEA. 
Miroslava wrote its first report on the terror instituted by criminal groups in the Sierra Tarahumara in 1999 when it published a complaint by human rights organizations about the incursion of gunmen who killed, tortured people and burned homes in the indigenous Rarámuris communities to force them to grow drugs. A year later, he first mentioned Adam Salazar Zamorano, the founder of the group of Los Salazares, from whom he published the rumor that he is the “main producer and buyer of drugs in the mountain ousnd zone”. He then pointed out how the authorities had let him escape even though they had been arrested with weapons, and another episode in which he suffered an attack on an elegant fractionation of Chihuahua from which his armed escorts saved him.
Although Miroslava had studied political science, and was easy and liked to make parliamentary chronicles, or write columns with which he would shake politicians, a colleague recalls that she explained that she had gone from covering political corruption to violence “when the political note became a red note.” Just since 2008, Chihuahua had become one of the most violent states and Ciudad Juárez for two years was the most violent city in the world. 
In that decade Miroslava was describing in his reports how armed groups – including Los Salazares – wanted to control electoral processes, first by mobilizing, then forcing voters to choose who they imposed as their candidates, or prevented installation of polling stations. He also began to mention mayors with “dangerous relationships” – on the list was Chinipas. In 2011, he mentioned how the criminal group under The command of Alfredo Salazar Ramírez, son of Adam, was taking over territories, putting up retainers, transporting hitmen on airplanes and implementing terror to open a new route to drug trafficking. That year Salazar Ramirez was imprisoned, at this time he has an protection not to be extradited to the United States where he is wanted to be prosecuted for cocaine trafficking. Miroslava’s following notes placed his uncle Crispín, Adam’s brother – imprisoned since 2011 – as his successor.
The Salazars began to make it clear that they did not like him writing about them from 2015. They let him know from a note he published about the forced displacement of hundreds of people over territorial disputes the group had in Chínipas. She was very outraged that old acquaintances of hers had to leave her home.
Then came the publication that layed down two candidacies, from which he received a “warning” from a well-known Serrano in contact with the criminals, then it was his frightened relatives of that region who mentioned the danger he was in. In May or June he received a phone call in which the spokesman of the state PAN, Alfredo Piñera, insisted that he reveal his sources of information about the identity of the Candidate of Chínipas, because they were blaming the panist municipal president . Miroslava refused, said not to look for his informants, who because he’s from Chinipas knows everything that goes on there. “That’s why I signed the note because I do have ovaries,” he said angrily, “because silence is complicity.” 
Piñera gave the recording to Schultz who handed it over to members of Los Salazares to take the pressure off the top, as established in the judicial investigation of the state prosecutor’s office.
On November 25, 2016, in column Don MironeMiroslava wrote of Schultz: “He also played as Salazar’s messenger to try to intimidate journalists who have documented what is happening in that region.” In the file initiated by the Attorney General’s Office of Chihuahua, continued by the federal Prosecutor’s Office specialized in the attention of Crimes committed against freedom of expression (FEADLE) there are two testimonies that mention that this politician gave him a threat. However, he was not interviewed about it, he was treated as a witness with a reserved identity, not a suspect.
The last article on the subject, published in February 2017, is probably the one that cost him his life. Titled “The cartels infiltrate the municipalities of Chihuahua”, he appointed public security directors linked to criminal groups and especially the powerful family of Chinipas, and the chief of police, also relative of Los Salazares, Martín Ramirez Medina, whom he identified as a criminal.
No one else in Chihuahua published that information. Most of the local press had learned to remain silent. The death toll until 2017 was 21, at least four journalists were in exile.  
A sung death
When he learned of his murder, there were so many and varied hypotheses about who would have ordered his death, as enemies Miroslava had earned for his notes. The record of his murder – read in part on 27 December 2017 at the hearing commencing the proceedings against Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa, alias Larry, lieutenant of Los Salazares – was recorded.
It is known from the testimonies and interviews conducted by this collective that Miroslava investigated for two years the enrichment of the outgoing priist governor César Duarte (now fugitive), and was the first to publicize the triangulation of funds through Banco Unión Progreso, a bank created by him. At the time of his murder – as he revealed The Day– was investigating the illicit drilling of water wells and the purchase of high-tech irrigation equipment in at least nine municipalities of the entity, all as part of a drug-trafficking money laundering operation.
For her there was no untouchable subject. 
“He had documented all the illicit enrichment of Governor César Duarte and the relationship with the narco that several politicians had, which was going to be slowly taking out reports, he told me that he had information about the mining relationship that the narcos had with the rulers and people of government,” a witness said. The person who gave that testimony recalls that, as a security measure, Miroslava bought different broadbands in other states to leave no trace of his internet searches.
The twenty relatives and colleagues who testified before the State Public Prosecutor’s Office mentioned that the notes of the “narcocandidaturas” are the most striking.
You may be interested: The five deaths linked to the murder of journalist Miroslava Breach
The threats that no one attended
In mid-August she warned the newly elected Governor Corral of threats, two months before she took office. That has been sustained by the family and reinforced by a colleague with a conversation about Whatsapp which he had with Miroslava in which he says Corral pledged to intervene. 
“He called me Corral last Friday, in a very good position in front of the subject we talked about. He said not to worry, that he would take letters in the matter with the mayor of Chínipas,” Miroslava wrote the conversation.
His interlocutor replied: “That’s good. Let them calm down the issue politically”
“I don’t know if I do,” Miroslava replied, “but at least he was sensitive, it makes a difference.”
Two sisters say the same thing, but they can’t prove it because, they said, their cell phones and computers were taken by the State’s Attorney’s Office on the day of the crime. 
Miroslava warned in different areas of the risks he was taking, but made no formal complaint. On 12 October 2016, at a meeting of the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders and Journalists in the city of Chihuahua, attended by journalists, defenders who were part of the transitional cabinet and envoys of the Governorate, he spoke publicly of his threats and were written in the rapporteurship of the meeting.
It is known that in November 2017, an acquaintance of Sonora warned her that old Crispin, or Chief Salazar, had been asking about her. When a relative asked him what he was going to do, Miroslava replied: “What am I going to do, someone has to say things.”  
She was upset with Corral because during his campaign he had given him information about the corruption he had documented from the previous government and he, once in power, had not used it. They had distanced theself from criticism he published from his column. She had also turned away from human rights defenders, her former allies, who had agreed to participate in Corral’s government, some claimed to have lost their critical spirit.
“During his election campaign, he had entrusted Corral with information about his research and he never did anything about it (…) I was very angry, disappointed, because that information was valuable,” an anonymous relative told the prosecution.
In December, Miroslava began telling her family and friends that the situation in the state was going to get worse, and warned that they would kill a journalist to “arm a mess” in the state, and that she was on the list. “They’re going to get fucked up,” a relative recalled.
He then asked for the price of the armor to the van, commissioned his sisters to their young son. On March 23, 2017, she was killed.
On the first anniversary of the murder, Miroslava’s five brothers reported that at a meeting Corral had offended them because he had hinted that Miroslava was responsible for his own death because he was “stepping on the devil’s calluses” when investigating subjects Dangerous. Corral denied having uttered those words.
A year earlier, at the press conference he gave on the day of the murder, Corral said Miros, using the nickname his friends told him of affection, he had informed him of the threats two years earlier (and not eight months ago as indicated by the testimonies and chat). She did not want to reveal who the person who had threatened her was, nor was she called to testify on this subject. He said the line of inquiry of the case would be his accumulated journalistic work and, two days later, mentioned his allegations about drug trafficking.
The content of the messages, or the information miroslava had on his computer and the hard drives collected by the Prosecutor’s Office, is unknown. That information is not recorded in the file. The files the sisters say they did not recover served to nurture files of the bank’s criminal groups, prosecutor Cesar Augusto Peniche told the local press this year. They served for other cases, not to clarify yours.
In September 2017, it was discovered that strangers broke into his house, did not steal, only stole papers. Like they’re looking for something. The same thing happened two months ago.
The court proceedings to which this collective had access do not reflect that the state and federal prosecutors had investigated the clues that Miroslava left in its publications about those who threatened it that would allow them to delve into who could be behind his crime.  The murder of Miroslava Breach Velducea the journalist who did not want to shut up is still unclear because, as he repeated, silence is complicity.
Discover the details of this second research on the website: www.proyectomiroslava.org and www.elclip.org
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Original source in Spanish