April 28, 2012
The neighbor’s iron gate stood ajar, something Isabel Nuñez failed to notice when she woke to her Saturday morning routine, during her household chores, or when she left at about 1 p.m. to go shopping.
It was on her way home when Yolanda Balderas stopped Isabel to ask her about the gate. Yolanda was a street vendor selling yogurt, as she always did on Saturdays, and stopped by the neighbor’s house. Not only was the gate ajar, Yolanda said, but across the cleanly swept concrete patio with the giant palm, the front door was open as well. The neighbor was never that careless.
“I knocked on the gate,” Yolanda told Isabel, “and I yelled her name, but there was no answer.”
“When I get home, I’ll give her a call,” Isabel replied.
They had been neighbors for years in the Felipe Carrillo Puerto district of Xalapa, the capital of the Mexican Gulf Coast state of Veracruz. Their street, Calle Privada Rodríguez Clara, marked the bottom of a small urban canyon, probably carved out centuries before by mountain runoff that had now been trained into an open sewage canal. Boxy stucco homes lined the road. Most residents settled there thirty or forty years ago, before there was even pavement, and they had to jump the canal to cross the street. As their earnings increased, families expanded their humble bungalows over time in phases, giving the houses a look of skewed toy building blocks. The streets parallel to Calle Privada Rodríguez Clara ran high above the canyon on either side, reachable by concrete stairs built into the slopes. Rundown apartment buildings clinging to the canyon walls were nicknamed favelas, after the hillside slums of Río de Janeiro.
The area was once considered marginal, a landing place for misfits and squatters, but over time grew into a solidly middle-class barrio of small-business owners, government workers, and teachers. On the path of Mexican upward mobility, their children studied engineering at the University of Veracruz, just up the hill.
Vagrants and drug users still gathered down the street, at a rusted children’s slide, to get high. The neighborhood had its share of petty crime. Isabel Nuñez knew that her neighbor was especially vigilant about security. She was a journalist, the Veracruz correspondent for the national investigative magazine Proceso. The neighbor told Isabel at one point that there were a lot of people who didn’t like what she wrote, who wanted to “erase” her, though she never named names.
The two had a cordial relationship. Sometimes the neighbor gave Isabel magazines. Sometimes Isabel watched the house when the neighbor was traveling for work. They also had their differences. The neighbor complained about the kids playing soccer in the street and about Isabel’s son playing his music too loud. The neighbor told her family and friends that Isabel was nosy. She didn’t like how Isabel always kept tabs on her from a second-story window, which directly overlooked the neighbor’s patio.
In fact, when Isabel was getting ready for bed the night before, she noticed from that same window that the gate was open, and called her neighbor to let her know; the neighbor didn’t answer. Or, maybe she did and thanked Isabel and said she would close it; then, maybe, Isabel went to bed. Or, maybe Isabel stayed up after the call and saw her neighbor come out and close the gate but not lock it, as if she were expecting someone. There were several versions of what Isabel Nuñez saw and did on the night of April 27, 2012, depending on which court documents or which person you consulted.
What is certain is that when Isabel arrived home the following afternoon, she knew something wasn’t right. She called the neighbor’s landline: no answer. She tried her cell: no answer. Now she was worried. She decided to wait a little longer for her neighbor to appear. At about 5 p.m., she finally called 066, the Mexican equivalent of 911.
A woman answered.
“My neighbor’s a journalist,” Isabel told the dispatcher, “and I noticed since this morning that her door is partly opened. But when I called the house and her cell phone, I couldn’t reach her. Could you send an officer please?”
The call went out to Patrol 1401 as a possible robbery at 208 Calle Privada Rodríguez Clara. Four state police officers in blue uniforms showed up twenty-five minutes later. Two of them entered the neighbor’s house, walking past the slightly open metal gate and pushing aside the metal door. Then one came back out and asked Isabel if she would accompany them inside. She agreed.
The front door of the tiny bungalow opened onto the living room, which was set up as an office and, to Isabel, appeared disheveled. From there they passed to the kitchen, on the left, and then walked straight into the single bedroom, where the dresser drawers were open and their contents dumped on the bed. Isabel’s eyes followed the floor to a pair of legs jutting out from the bathroom. It was the neighbor, lying on her back, arms outstretched, on the marble-patterned linoleum.
Her head lay against the stone finish of the tub, her face to one side, a bloody cleaning rag around her neck. There was a bloodstain on her brown vest and another on her orange blouse, the same clothing Isabel saw her wearing the day before, when they briefly greeted each other as Isabel took out the trash. The neighbor’s jeans, unbuttoned, with the zipper halfway down, had dust and blood spots at the knees.
“Is this Regina Martínez?” the officer asked.
“Yes,” Isabel said, and ran from the house in distress.
The officer leaned down to feel the dead woman’s wrist for a pulse, knowing he wouldn’t find one. Then he called for backup.
I am standing in front of the same iron gate, which is locked now. There’s a taxi crammed into the patio. The bungalow looks abandoned, except for a light on near the front door and men’s clothing drying on a line strung outside. There is no bell, so I try knocking on the gate. My knuckles make no sound, and no one answers.
I ring the bell at Isabel Nuñez’s house. I figure enough time has passed—eight years. I am wrong.
A second-floor window with metal mullions slides open. I look up at the lavender stucco façade to see a small middle-aged woman with a round face and dyed-brown hair.
“What do you want?” she says crossly. I think of one of my earlier times in Mexico, when I went to study Spanish and stayed with a family in an ample house surrounded by a garden and a big wall. Whenever anyone rang the bell, they never answered the door, but rather, hollered, ¿Quien? “Who?” from inside the house. It was a way to screen unwanted visitors.
The street I am standing on is of patchy pavement and hard mud. The late-afternoon sky is gray this work-holiday Monday, the day I decide to approach Isabel, thinking the street will be quiet and I won’t call too much attention to myself. The water in the nearby canal whooshes from the recent rain.
“I’m working on a project about this area, and I’d like to talk to you,” I say vaguely. I don’t want to yell the subject of my inquiry up to the second story. I am trying to be discreet.
“About what?” Again, cross. “Why me?”
I tell her I prefer not to shout the details and ask if she could come down and talk.
She stares back. I have no choice.
“It’s about your neighbor.”
“What neighbor?”
I nod my head toward the iron gate where I am standing, which abuts Isabel’s home. From the corner of my eye, I see a young dark-haired man with a similar round face watching from the second-floor balcony.
“I don’t talk about that,” she says.
I tell her it’s a project about her neighbor’s life and her work as a valiant reporter.
“No,” she insists. “It was a terrible hit for us.”
“I can imagine,” I say. If she were standing next to me, that would have been my entrée to ask how. But from twelve feet below, it is impossible.
“We don’t talk about it,” she repeats sternly. “That chapter is closed.”
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From In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, A Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press by Katherine Corcoran, forthcoming October 18. Copyright © 2022 by Katherine Corcoran. All rights reserved.
