Mexico City, May 23, 2025—Mexican authorities must immediately investigate a series of threatening phone calls targeting Adela Navarro, editorial director of Tijuana-based weekly magazine Zeta, and take all appropriate steps to guarantee her and her staff’s safety, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Friday.
“The threats against Adela Navarro, amid a spike in violence against Mexican reporters since the beginning of the year, are deeply troubling,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Mexican authorities cannot stand by idly and leave reporters like Navarro vulnerable against such threats.”
Navarro, whom CPJ honored with its 2007 International Press Freedom Award for her work covering crime and corruption in the border city of Tijuana, told CPJ that the magazine had received eight calls between April 29 and May 16. Each time, an unidentified male, who called the reception desk, said “tell Adela Navarro to be careful” and then hung up, she said.
Navarro said she believed the calls may be related to an April 28 article asserting that state authorities hid information about a clandestine grave in Tijuana allegedly used by organized crime to dump victims’ bodies.
Navarro and Zeta, one of Mexico’s most widely respected investigative magazines, are a frequent target of attacks, threats, and harassment by authorities and organized crime. In January, the magazine reported that it had been threatened in a so-called “narcomanta,” a banner hung in the La Libertad neighborhood of Tijuana. Police attributed the banner, which included a warning about Zeta’s reputation, to organized crime.
Several journalists from the magazine have been murdered, including co-founder Héctor Félix Miranda in 1988, editor Francisco Ortiz Franco in 2004, and photographer Margarito Martínez in 2022, while Zeta’s other co–founder, Jesús Blancornelas, survived an attempt on his life in 1997.
CPJ reached out to Laureano Carrillo Rodríguez, Baja California’s state secretary of citizen security, for comment via messaging app, but did not receive a reply.
Editor’s note: This text has been updated to clarify the headline.