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 →
Rest of World, June 2020. En español aquí. Luisana Aguilar Alvarado contributed reporting. It was early October 2019, and Quito was on fire. Smoke from Molotov cocktails and tear gas blanketed buildings, mixing with the flames of burning tires. Whole families marched in the melee. Men with T-shirts tied around their mouths threw rocks... 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 →
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 →
Contra Corriente, Oct 2019, New York. En español aquí. With Jennifer Ávila. A trial in New York reveals narco control in Honduras *This article has been amended since its original publication to reflect changing news. Tony Hernández is a former congressman from Honduras' ruling National Party and the brother of the sitting president. Since... 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 →
The Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2018. A brick wall, the first layer of the barrier, encircles most of a city block on an unassuming street in Guatemala City. On the other side is a checkpoint with metal detectors like airport security. Next comes a winding walk flanked by two security guards, and then,... Continue Reading →
The Intercept, April 2018. With Cora Currier. En Español aquí. At 6:02 A.M. on August 27, 2017, the president of Guatemala, Jimmy Morales, uploaded a video statement to Twitter declaring the former Colombian judge Iván Velásquez a persona non grata and ordering his expulsion from the country. Velásquez is investigating corruption on behalf of a United Nations-backed commission... 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 →
The Intercept, December 2017. On the night of December 2, 2017, a Honduran woman in the rural province of Olancho was protesting what she saw as a stolen election. The woman, eight months pregnant, stood in the streets in violation of a national curfew, and she screamed alongside a rebellious multitude, “Fuera JOH!” (“Out JOH!”), referring... Continue Reading →
