The New Yorker, April 2025. An MS-13 leader knew key details of a secret deal that his gang allegedly made with the Salvadoran President—then the White House put him on a flight to El Salvador. By now, the images of Donald Trump’s March 15th flights to El Salvador are all too familiar: shackled Venezuelans being... Continue Reading →
Records show Nucor retained ties to Honduran mine as assassinations of opponents mounted
Drilled and Contracorriente, October 2024. With Fernando Silva. Jennifer Ávila contributed reporting; photos by Fernando Destephen. Disponible en español. Honduran environmentalist Juan López had a priestly calm. His steady gaze and his way of speaking, polite but direct, were notable whether he was philosophizing with friends or leading a protest. Although he knew well the... Continue Reading →
Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian appeal, from San Salvador to Washington
The New Yorker, April 2024. On the afternoon of February 4th, as Salvadorans were voting in Presidential and legislative elections, a fifty-seven-year-old writer named Carlos Bucio Borja walked into a polling place near his home in the capital and began to read the constitution aloud. The sitting President, Nayib Bukele, was seeking a second consecutive mandate, which legal... Continue Reading →
Carta a los lectores: Lanzamiento del portal “Narcoestado en Juicio”, un análisis hondureño de los juicios SDNY
Febrero 2024. Queridos lectores, Este es un post un poco distinto. No es un artículo, sino una carta. Les quiero compartir algo que hemos construido con mis queridas colegas de Contracorriente: un portal de documentos y análisis de los juicios estadounidenses contra el narcoestado hondureño. Esté donde esté usted en este momento, a lo mejor... Continue Reading →
The ‘relentless emotional journey’ of the mothers of Central America’s disappeared
The New Yorker, May 2021. Film by Erin Semine Kökdil. The opening scene of the film “Desde Que Llegaste, Mi Corazón Dejó de Pertenecerme” (“Since You Arrived, My Heart Stopped Belonging to Me”) is shot through the windshield of a bus barrelling through fog, wipers swiping to no avail. We cannot discern what doom—or what... Continue Reading →
Rape and Reparations in Mexico
Lux Magazine, No. 1. En español en Alharaca. Art by Sofía Clausse. This reporting was supported by a grant from the Fund for Constitutional Government. Beginning in the summer of 2015, millions of women filled the streets of Latin America in a series of marches united by a hashtag at once a slogan and a... Continue Reading →
José Ángel Flores: Paramilitaries and African Palm in Honduras
June 2020, available here. From the book, Faces of Assassination, published by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. On 20 December 2013, José Ángel Flores Menjivar wrote the list. The 63-year-old president of the Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán (MUCA in Spanish), a farmworkers’ cooperative in the Bajo Aguán region of Honduras, put 29... Continue Reading →
Marcelo Rivera: Mining, Water and Organized Crime in El Salvador
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 →
Al interior del complot para asesinar a Berta Cáceres // Inside the Plot to Kill a Honduran Activist
The Intercept, Diciembre 2019. In English here. Leia em português. Con Chiara Eisner. Ya pasaron más de tres años desde que Berta Cáceres fue asesinada en su casa en Honduras. Cáceres era una activista de 44 años, madre y una celebridad mundial —recibió el Premio Ambiental Goldman en el año 2015 por dirigir una campaña... Continue Reading →
In Mexico, where the bodies are buried // Drones sobrevuelan tierras de fosas
The Verge, May 2019. En español en Periodistas de a Pie. Photos by Ximena Natera, with reporting support from Miguel Ángel León Carmona. Mexico’s drug war has left tens of thousands of casualties in secret graves. Now, the mothers of the missing are digging them up, armed with iron rods and quadcopter drones. Roberto Carlos Casso... Continue Reading →