Lilly Téllez

Lilly Téllez is a Mexican journalist for TV Azteca, the second most important TV broadcast company in Mexico.

She was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, where she worked in a local TV channel until 1994, when she was hired as main host of Azteca's main news program, "Hechos". She is also an investigative reporter.

In June 22, 2000, her car was shot by a group of unknown men, but she was unharmed. She attributed this attack to a recent airing of an investigation related to the Arellano Félix family of drug dealers.

In 2005 she began a new investigative program, Myths and Facts, transmitted twice a month. In this program she announced a five-program series of an investigation related to the FOBAPROA (a government program to deal with the generalized bankruptcy of banks in the late 1990s (see 1994 economic crisis in Mexico). She and Javier Alatorre, another important "Azteca" reporter, charged the Mexican government tried to stop the airing of the program as it talked about supposed incidents of political corruption of Fox's cabinet member Francisco Gil Díaz. They showed as proof of this an unsigned memo, printed on plain paper, that allegedly was given by Gil to an Azteca representative in Gil's office. They claimed it had Gil's fingerprints on it. This accusation was met with heavy skepticism even by Mexican journalists – the FOBAPROA was created almost 10 years ago, was heavily scrutinized from the beginning, and Téllez investigation didn't add anything new to the existing body of information. It also focused on Gil's activities at the time and on Banamex bank, completely ignoring other, far more controversial actors.

Téllez "proof" was too weak, and the timing suspicious – just before Francisco Gil announced, as part of his work in Fox's government, sanctions to TV Azteca's owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego for illegal profit from privileged information both in the United States stock market (where he is prosecuted under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act) and in the Mexican one in operations related to his cell-phone company Unefon.

Both Gil Díaz and Banamex Bank disregarded the accusations as a blackmail attempt to stop the process against Salinas Pliego. Sanctions were announced as expected, and after Azteca's stock fell, the rest of Téllez investigation apparently was cancelled.

References

* [http://www.tvazteca.com/programas/barrapolitica/mitoshechos/denuncia.pdf TV Azteca's legal accusation against Francisco Gil Díaz.] (PDF format, in Spanish)