Carmen Aristegui

María del Carmen Aristegui Flores (born January 18, 1964) is a Mexican journalist and anchorwoman.

She is widely regarded as one of Mexico's leading journalists and opinion leaders, and is best known for her critical investigations of the Mexican government.

She is the anchor of the news program Aristegui on CNN en Español, and writes regularly for the opinion section of the periodical Reforma.

Aristegui was born on 18 January 1964 in Mexico City, the fifth of seven children.

Her father was a Basque Spaniard who had immigrated to Mexico when he was a child as a refugee in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and her mother was of Spanish and French heritage.

She has said that it was because of her family background that she has dedicated her life to journalism.

Aristegui grew up in the Colonia Álamos, a neighbourhood in the Benito Juárez division in the south-central part of Mexico City.

She attended primary school at the Escuela Primaria Estado De Chiapas, and attended secondary school at Club de Leones de la Ciudad de México.

Her first job, at age 17, was with an accounting firm, Ayala and Associates.

She attended the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), where she initially studied sociology and then switched to communication sciences.

She began her television career on Channel 13, then Imevisión (currently TV Azteca) as an assistant on the financial-news program Monitor Financiero, hosted by Efrén Flores.

Later she was on Imevisión's team of journalists.

According to a profile in Quien, Aristegui's "communication skills and her tenacity at work ensured that she came to be part of the team of news readers and reporters on the more than fifteen daily news programs broadcast by Imevisión on its five or six channels. Before long, she and Javier Solórzano ranked as the cornerstones of the 7 AM news broadcast on channel 13."

She worked on the program En Blanco y Negro alongside Javier Solórzano, broadcast by MVS, and in 2001 was also on Círculo Rojo on Televisa.

Among the programs in which she has taken part are Para Empezar ("To Begin With") on MVS Radio, and the early broadcast of Imagen Informativa ("Informative Image") on Grupo Imagen, on which she was a regular until November 2002, when she had a conflict with Pedro Ferríz de Con, who did not allow her to enter the studio to broadcast the show.

After this incident, she and Javier Solórzano chose to depart from Grupo Imagen.

In an act of solidarity, the hosts of the later broadcasts of Imagen Informativa, Ilana Sod, Julio Boltvinik, Denise Dresser, and Vivian Hiriart also quit.

She worked on the news program Noticias Canal 52: Aristegui-Solórzano, broadcast on channel 52MX, from 2003 to 2006.

In 2005, after more than 15 years of working together at various media (Imevisión, MVS, Imagen, Televisa, Canal 52), Aristegui and Solórzano announced that they would be separating professionally on account of "conflicting schedules".

In addition, she worked on the channel 11 program Primer Plano.

For over 5 years she hosted the program Partidos Políticos.

Since 2005 she has been the host of the interview program Aristegui, broadcast on CNN en Español.

Aristegui has worked for various radio stations, including Radio Educación, FM Globo and Stereorey.

"Early in December 2007," Aristegui said, "I was informed of the network's desire not to renew my contract, but they left open the possibility of staying on. The network notified me that they sought to change the contractual conditions in some respects, incorporating some changes in editorial direction...We discussed it and looked forward to specific proposals, but in the end it didn't happen."

In her final broadcast, she said that she had been surprised by the news of her termination.

The split coincided with the March 2007 appointment of Daniel Moreno, who was close to the wife of Zavala and former president Vicente Fox's wife Marta Sahagún, as director of W. Though Hoy por Hoy had attained its highest audience levels ever with Aristegui at the helm, beginning in 2007, Aristegui was conspicuously omitted from the list of electronic journalists who were granted interviews with the Mexican president.

Aristegui hosted the program Hoy por Hoy ("Nowadays") on W Radio until 4 January 2008, when, after several months that had been marked by increased tensions between herself and her employers about the extent to which she should be allowed to express certain opinions, she parted ways with the network, citing differences over its planned changes in editorial direction.

On 5 January 2008, La Jornada reported that after the show's final broadcast, Aristegui received applause from station workers, lasting for several minutes.

Hosts of the stations Ke-Buena, Los 40 Principales and Bésame Mucho, which broadcast from the same building, also gathered there to applaud the journalist's work.

Outside, listeners gathered spontaneously to protest Aristegui's firing, some of them carrying signs reading "Long live our right to information!", "We will not be silenced! Long live our freedom of expression!"

and "Carmen, we are with you, because Mexico needs valiant and principled journalists like you."

Voces Silenciadas ("Silenced Voices"), a 2009 documentary by Maria del Carmen de Lara about the persecution of journalists in Mexico and the relationship between the Mexican media and politicians, used Aristegui's departure from W Radio as its starting point.

De Lara stated publicly that the Aristegui case showed how concentrated media ownership in Mexico had narrowed the range of permissible opinions in Mexico's media.

MVS Radio and Aristegui reached an agreement in early 2009 to begin a new radio show on Noticias MVS.

The daily show, which began airing in January 2009, dealt with issues in much greater depth than her twenty-minute TV show for CNN.

On 6 July 2009 (the day of the 2009 midterm elections) the program also began broadcasting on channel 52MX, which also belongs to MVS.

Guests on this program included various Mexican political figures, such as Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Roberto Madrazo Pintado.

The show featured an interview with former president Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado in which he expressed disappointment in his successor, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, because of the latter's family corruption and links to drug cartels.

In March 2015, she was illegally fired from MVS Radio 102.5 FM in Mexico City following a report on the conflict of interests by then Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, with a state contractor who would have built a millionaire residence for the president and his family.

She manages her own news website and hosts an online morning newscast, which is also broadcast on Grupo Radio Centro's XERC-FM.