José Luis Ortega Mata

José Luis Ortega Mata (1964 – 19 February 2001) was a Mexican journalist and director of the Semanario de Ojinaga, a weekly newspaper based in Ojinaga, Chihuahua in northern Mexico.

With fifteen years of experience as a journalist, Ortega Mata was known for publishing articles about organized crime, political and law enforcement corruption, and drug trafficking. On a February evening in 2001, an unknown gunman shot the journalist twice in the head and killed him. The crime remains unsolved; it is unknown if his assassination was a crime of passion or a reprisal for his work on the Mexican drug cartels.

Early life and career José Luis Ortega Mata was an editor and director of the Semanario de Ojinaga, a weekly newspaper from Ojinaga, Chihuahua in northern Mexico. Before working for this weekly, he was an editor for another newspaper known as Prensa Libre. With over fifteen years of experience as a journalist, Ortega Mata wrote about crime, corruption, and the local drug trade. He was the president-elect of the Ojinaga Association of Photographers and Cameramen.

His journalistic work encompassed a series of investigations where he denounced government officials, law enforcement, and businessmen that reportedly had ties with drug traffickers based in the northern part of the country. In his last work before being assassinated, Ortega Mata published an article about a drug investigation carried out by the Attorney General's Office (PGR) in Aldama, a town nearby Chihuahua, Chihuahua. The report mentioned how alleged drug traffickers moved narcotics to the United States by storing them in safe houses across Aldama and Ojinaga before smuggling them across the border. His bullet-ridden corpse was located by paramedics besides his minivan nearby his home. The motor of his vehicle, as well as its headlights, were on; his camera and wallet were left at the scene.

Family members and friends of him believe that the murder was carried out by an organized crime group as a reprisal for covering topics relating to drug trafficking, specifically for Ortega Mata's report on the drug investigations in a town of Chihuahua. Reportedly, the journalist had also been working on publishing an investigation alleging that drug kingpins in the area were financing local election campaigns for certain politicians.

On 29 April 2001 in Ojinaga, the Chihuahua state authorities arrested a Texas resident named Jesús Manuel Herrera, and charged him with the assassination of Ortega Mata based on a supposed eye-witness account.

The assassination of Ortega Mata remains unpunished and unsolved; reports prior to his assassination indicate that he had received death threats for writing about corruption and the Mexican drug cartels. There are other reports that suggest that his murder may possibly be a crime of passion. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the suspected force behind Ortega Mata's assassination, however, is a Mexican organized crime group.