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 Puerto Vallarta Real Estate | June 2006 
Publisher Lands in Trouble in Baja
 LATimes
| | (Illustration: Book Warren) |
Ensenada, Mexico — Publisher Nancy Conroy has created a niche for her twice-monthly newspaper by printing the kind of real estate information you won’t find in glossy brochures.
Readers of the English-language Gringo Gazette have learned about time-share hucksters, stolen deposits, flimsy contracts and other pitfalls that have tripped up Americans racing to grab a piece of Mexico’s fast-growing Baja peninsula.
It’s a focus that has won her friends among would-be property buyers. It has also made her enemies among developers and cost her some advertisers. The outspoken USC Law School graduate may soon pay a higher price: her freedom.
Conroy, 41, faces as much as two years in prison stemming from criminal defamation and calumny charges related to articles she wrote about a Rosarito condominium development. Conroy reported that the parcel where the project was being constructed along the rugged northern Baja coastline was the subject of a long-running title dispute that could pose a risk to buyers.
The developers also filed civil lawsuits against Conroy and her newspaper seeking about $20 million in lost sales and damages after some purchasers allegedly backed out of their contracts after reading of the land-ownership battle in the Gringo Gazette starting in November 2004.
Court records and a spokesman for the Mexican developers, whose original partners included former Rosarito Mayor Hugo Eduardo Torres Chabert, paint Conroy as a muckraker who dragged the name of one of the city’s leading families through the mud in a campaign to discredit them, benefit their business rivals and generate headlines for her publication.
Julio Mendivil, spokesman for the development group, acknowledged the existence of the competing title claim. But he said the partners believed that it had no merit and that their reputations suffered as a result of Conroy’s articles.
“The company is going to put her in jail and run her out of the country,” said Mendivil, administrator of Desarrolladora de las Californias, in a tape-recorded interview in his downtown Rosarito office. ” … We’re going after her with everything we’ve got, whatever it costs.”
Conroy, who said she was notified last week that she would have to stand trial in the criminal proceeding, said the developers were retaliating against her for disclosing facts that they didn’t want buyers to know and that they aren’t required to reveal to clients under Mexican law. Conroy said she stood by her reporting and expressed confidence that she would be vindicated in court.
Still, Conroy said her experience might make other scribes in Mexico wary about taking on tough topics and powerful people. In addition to racking up thousands of dollars in legal fees, Conroy said, she has become the target of an investigation into her immigration status that Mexican officials launched at the behest of the developers, a fact that Mendivil confirmed. She said she received an anonymous e-mail death threat and has had her newspapers stolen from racks. |
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