Journalist and fact-checker, The New Yorker
The Intercept, May 2017. See accompanying film by Leighton Akio Woodhouse and Pedro Armando Aparicio here. Thousands of miles from his home and family, Jose Escobar lives in a small rural community in La Unión, El Salvador, amid fields of sugar cane and corn, bordered by the Chaparrastique volcano and the Gulf of Fonseca. Escobar,... Continue Reading →
The Huffington Post, January 2017. The US promised more support for a refugee crisis close to home. Why has its program, the PTA, helped just one family in nearly six months? SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador – The garage of a one-story, cinder-block building has been converted into a makeshift waiting room. Six families sit... Continue Reading →
The Intercept, April 2016. An interview with the sole witness of the murder of Berta Cáceres. Leer en español abajo. Gustavo Castro was the sole witness to the murder on March 3 of Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, the co-founder of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Movements of Honduras (COPINH). Castro, the director of Other Worlds,... Continue Reading →
The Establishment, April 2016. In the U.S. media, Central America and Mexico mostly appear as places overpowered by corruption and skyrocketing murder rates. Violence is a defining characteristic of life here, especially for young people—but so is creativity, and art. The Establishment recently caught up with two hip-hop artists who use music to engage in a public... Continue Reading →
The New Yorker, February 2016. Before it dawned on him that he would have to flee his country—a realization aided by a series of death threats in November of last year—the Salvadoran writer Jorge Galán had some questions for Father Jon Sobrino, an elderly Jesuit priest. Father Sobrino is from Spain, but he has spent... Continue Reading →
The RiverFront Times, February 2015. A handcuffed student drowned in custody of the Missouri Highway Patrol. One witness seeks justice with a rogue investigation. Larry Moreau and his family were cruising the Lake of the Ozarks on a sunny Saturday last May when they noticed a Missouri Highway Patrol boat race past them. Moreau, an engineer from nearby Jefferson... Continue Reading →
The New Republic, December 2014. It’s lunchtime at Maritza Grande’s oceanside restaurant in the Fonseca Gulf of Honduras. She scurries from the kitchen, where she is frying fish and plantains and chopping lettuce, to the bar, where she pries caps off soda bottles. Teenage boys sit at the restaurant’s picnic tables, drinking cokes and listening... Continue Reading →
Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2014. In 1994, nine Nigerian environmental and social justice activists were arrested by their government, then tortured and hanged. Throughout the 1990s, they had protested the conditions surrounding oil exploration in their country by the transnational corporation Royal Dutch Shell and its subsidiaries. In 2002 the widow of one victim, Esther Kiobel,... Continue Reading →
The Global Post, March 2014. With Gloria Morán. With victory in tow, LGBT rights groups now push new president to end violence, corruption and discrimination. Rubi Navas is among the first transgender women in the history of El Salvador to be allowed to vote. In previous years, Rubi and her peers were normally barred from... Continue Reading →
Danielle Mackey 