Journalist and fact-checker, The New Yorker
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 →
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 →
Al Jazeera America, May 2015. A proposed trade agreement between the United States and the European Union that would allow corporations to sue governments has Europeans up in arms. The trade agreement includes a network of tribunals that put into practice the so-called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, which was until two years ago understood... 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 →
CityLimits, October 2014. Angelica is one of the lucky ones. A "smart and bubbly" 8 year old Honduran girl who "loves, loves, loves math," according to the director of the legal advocacy organization that helped her, Angelica is one of an estimated 60,000 undocumented minors from Central America caught since October 2013 while trying to flee... 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 →
Le Monde Diplomatique, December 13, 2013. NEW YORK Jose (1) was a closeted gay teenager when he was brutally sexually assaulted by gang members in his native El Salvador and fled to the United States, illegally. He suspected he was targeted because of his sexual orientation. The trauma and shame prevented him from... Continue Reading →
