Roxana Guzmán was taken away in front of her parents, her children, her brother, and her nephews. An armed group dragged the Veracruz journalist from her home, threw her to the ground in her family’s yard in Nanchital, handcuffed and beat her, threw her into the street before forcing her into the back of a car and driving off “to the unknown.”
It was the morning of June 2nd. Two weeks have passed without any news of her whereabouts, and her family is “devastated, broken.” That’s how her mother, Rubicelia Ramírez, 62, describes it, living in fear. With a gentle voice, the woman acknowledges that she never imagined having to give interviews, having to live through this: “I wholeheartedly join the mothers searching for their missing children because this is like being in hell.” The Attorney General’s Office (FGR) has taken over the investigation into the journalist’s case after its rapid escalation, partly due to the brutal video of her kidnapping.
Federal agents only called Rubicelia this Monday to check in. That has reassured her somewhat, she says on the other end of the phone: “I feel there will be more pressure, that they will redouble their efforts. They have to move forward now so they can return my daughter to me.”
Veracruz has once again become the epicenter of violence against journalists. In early January, Carlos Leonardo Ramírez, a young journalist from Poza Rica, was killed; on June 2, Roxana Guzmán, who ran a local news Facebook page in Nanchital, was kidnapped; and on the same day that millions of eyes were on the opening of the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Mexico City, 300 kilometers away, Luis Ángel López Valdez was murdered, also in Poza Rica.
This is not the first time the state has become the focus of terror against the press: the six-year term of Governor Javier Duarte (2010-2016) is recorded as the most violent in the country’s history, with 18 journalists murdered. Since 2000, nowhere else in Mexico have more journalists been killed than in Veracruz. The current governor, Rocío Nahle, has limited herself to saying that the attacks “are not because of their journalistic work”: “Here in my government there is absolute freedom of expression.”
At 6:00 a.m. on June 2, an armed group entered the Guzmán family’s yard in Nanchital. “There were four people dressed in black, carrying long guns. I thought they were the police because they were dressed exactly like that: dark clothes and hoods. One or two of them were wearing sneakers, not boots,” describes Rubicelia Ramírez, who recounts that her daughter, Roxana Guzmán, was getting ready to go for a run, as she did every day.
“They grabbed her, dragged her out of the house, threw her to the ground, handcuffed her, and beat her. My husband was also coming out at that moment, and they threw him to the ground and beat him. She was still saying, ‘Not my dad, because my dad is sick,’” Ramírez explains. Her husband is diabetic and has chronic neuropathy (nerve damage that causes pain in the legs and feet): “He suffers a lot, and unfortunately, that day they kicked him in the legs and hit him with the gun.”
