Journalist and fact-checker, The New Yorker
NACLA and Taylor & Francis Online, November 2020. With Pamela Ruiz. This is an excerpt; complete copies are available at either publisher. My reporting for this piece was thanks to a grant from The Fund for Constitutional Government. In April 2020, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele reacted to a wave of murders by ordering prison officials... Continue Reading →
June 2020, available here. From the book, Faces of Assassination, published by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. When he was a teenager, Miguel Ángel Rivera joined his older brother, Marcelo, to do community work in their home town of San Isidro in the department of Cabañas, El Salvador. In the early 1990s, they would... Continue Reading →
The Chicago Reader, February 2020. With The Invisible Institute. Officer Salvador Enrique Chavez stood ready to apprehend a colleague accused of murder. It was December 29, 2017. The 40-year-old was two months from celebrating his 18th year on the Salvadoran police force. As a member of the SWAT-style unit called the Grupo de Reaccion Policial... Continue Reading →
Equal Times, March 2020. En español, français. Photographs by Martín Cálix. On an average day, Joel Almendares is counselling Honduran middle and high school students about how to excel in school and plan their futures. But he is also fighting off worries about violent attacks on himself and his unionised colleagues. Almendares is secretary general... Continue Reading →
The Intercept, November 2018. There are an estimated 60,000 gang members in El Salvador. Benjamin knew many who wanted to leave the gangs. He wanted to show them it was possible. Benjamin suspected the Salvadoran gang Barrio 18 Revolucionarios would kill him when he asked permission to leave. He was 21 years old and had... Continue Reading →
The Intercept, October 2018. With Cora Currier. Leia em português. Oswaldo joined the Salvadoran gang Barrio 18 when he was 14 years old. By the time he was in his early 20s, he wanted out — and luckily, gang leaders gave him permission to leave. But they warned him: “No one will offer you a... Continue Reading →
World Politics Review, Feb 2018. Editor’s Note: In July 2019, this story received an Honorable Mention by the National Press Club for the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence, which recognizes excellence in reporting on diplomatic and foreign policy issues. Late one morning in the fall of 2016, police officers handcuffed a group of middle... Continue Reading →
Equal Times, June 2017. En español, français. The municipality of Santo Tomas, El Salvador, absorbs the impacts of the maquila industry like a human body. Its daily routine ebbs and flows with the textile production schedule like blood through veins. At 06:00, the 37 bus bulges with women from Santo Tomas en route to work in the maquila zones of... Continue Reading →
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 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 →
