Javier Duarte de Ochoa (born 19 September 1973) is a Mexican politician and kleptocrat, formerly affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), who served as Governor of Veracruz from 2010 to 2016.

[8] Shortly after beginning his term as a congressman in 2009, Duarte de Ochoa's name began to be mentioned as one of the leading PRI candidates for governor of Veracruz in the 2010 elections.

[12] However, accusations of suspicious votes and rampant fraud led the opposition parties to file a formal request for an investigation and vote-by-vote recount, which was accepted by the PRI on 8 July 2010.

[14][15] In September 2011, 35 bodies were found tortured and murdered in two abandoned trucks in the town of Boca del Río, Veracruz, outside a building where governor Duarte de Ochoa was conducting a meeting.

Finance Secretary Tomás Ruiz González claimed that in spite of the odd mode of transportation, the money was legal and intended to pay for the advertisement of local festivals.

[25] The most notorious case was that of journalist Regina Martínez Pérez, widely known for her reporting on Veracruz state corruption and its links to drug cartels, who was found strangled to death in her apartment on 28 April 2012.

[27] Due to the unprecedented number of journalist killings during Duarte de Ochoa's term as governor, the international association Reporters Without Borders named the state of Veracruz one of the ten most dangerous places in the world in which to practice journalism.

[28] After being hit by a wave of corruption scandals and the loss of his PRI membership, Duarte presented his resignation to the Veracruz state legislature on 12 October 2016 and made his last public appearance the next day, leaving his whereabouts unknown from that date until his arrest on 15 April 2017.