Adela Navarro Bello

Adela Navarro Bello (born 1968 in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico) is a Mexican journalist and the general director of the Tijuana weekly magazine Zeta. Zeta, which was founded in 1980, is one of the few publications that frequently reports on organized crime, drug trafficking, and corruption in Mexico's border cities. Multiple editors and reporters working for Zeta have been murdered, including Héctor Félix Miranda, co-founder of Zeta, and co-editor Francisco Ortiz Franco.

In college, she majored in communications. During her time there, Jesús Blancornelas, a well-known Tijuana investigative journalist, came to lecture in the college, and Navarro asked him for a job covering politics for his magazine Zeta. Wearied by the deaths of several of his editors, Blancornelas had begun to doubt Zeta s ability to foster change, and had considered closing the magazine with his death, but Navarro and Blanco persuaded him to let the magazine continue.

As the magazine's new director, Navarro continued Blancornelas' tradition of high-risk reporting on organized crime, stating that "Every time a journalist self-censors, the whole society loses".

In January 2010, US law enforcement notified Navarro of death threats from the Tijuana Cartel, causing the Mexican government to assign her seven soldiers as bodyguards. She is also the recipient of a 2011 International Women's Media Foundation Courage in Journalism award.

In 1999, Navarro was commissioned by the U.S. Department of State to undertake a six-city U.S. tour with the theme of "migration". She has also been awarded the 2008 Prize Ortega y Gasset, given by the country of Spain; the 2009 International Prize of Freedom of the Press, given by Editorial Perfil, Argentina; and the Anna Politkovskaja Prize, Festival Internazionale a Ferrara, Italia in 2009. In 2010, the Missouri School of Journalism awarded her its Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism. The following year, she was listed among the "50 Most Powerful Women in Mexico" by Forbes magazine.

Navarro and Zeta are profiled in the Bernardo Ruiz documentary Reportero.

In popular culture

Andrea Nuñez's character, played by Luisa Rubino in season three of Narcos: Mexico, is loosely based on Navarro.