Cartels, Corruption and Investigative Reporting – Ioan Grillo – Luis Chaparro – Katherine Corcoran
Independent journalists and authors discuss their investigations into the power of cartels and government collusion.
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Panelists:
Katherine CorcoranModerator:
Description: Independent journalists and authors discuss their investigations into the power of cartels and government collusion.
*Note: Participation by any panelist does not indicate their agreement with or endorsement of the opinions of any other conference participant. The presence of any panelist does not mean Plebity endorses or shares their opinions.
Ioan Grillo is a journalist and writer based in Mexico City, working for outlets including the New York Times, France 24 and National Geographic. He has been covering Latin America since 2001 for news media such as Time Magazine, Esquire, CNN, Reuters, Al Jazeera, The Houston Chronicle, The Associated Press, GlobalPost, France 24, The Sunday Telegraph, Letras Libres and many others. Grillo is author of the books Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels (2021), Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields and the New Politics of Latin America (2016), and El Narco: Inside Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (2011).
Katherine Corcoran is a former Associated Press bureau chief for Mexico and Central America. She has been an Alicia Patterson fellow, the Hewlett Fellow for Public Policy at the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, and a Logan Nonfiction Program fellow. At the AP, she led an award-winning team that broke major stories about cartel and state violence and abuse of authority in Mexico and Central America. Corcoraan is author of the book In the Mouth of the Wolf: A Murder, a Cover-Up, and the True Cost of Silencing the Press.
Luis Chaparro is a bilingual journalist who reports in English and Spanish on the drug wars and the cartels at CNN, Business Insider, The Daily Beast, Vice World News, The Guardian, Univision, Playboy, and others outlets. Chaparro’s YouTube channel is here https://www.youtube.com/luischaparro and his website is https://www.lchaparro.com/.
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Transcript
Ioan: Great to be here for participating as part of this conference on free speech and the left.
We’ve got a great panel here. Okay, so myself I'm Ioan and so I say great, myself but myself, I'm moderating this panel, and also I’m a journalist, covering cartels and corruption, I’m based in Mexico City I've been here for 22 years, author of three books.Free Speech and the Left Conference - June 2023.
We’ve got Luis Chaparro who is a fantastic journalist originally from Ciudad Juarez. He grew up there with all of the crazy violence when it was the most murderous city in the world it was the beginning of his journalistic career, and he’s still been at it one of the kind of hardcore few Mexican journalists really going deep into the cartel stuff, Sinaloa, all over the country and on the US side as well.
And then Katherine Corcoran, She was the bureau chief for AP in Mexico City for many years, is author of this fantastic book investigating the murder, one of the most high profile murder cases of a Mexican journalist Regina Martinez, In the Mouth of the Wolf. And it's a very, very great book there.
So yeah, it's a very, very short bio if there’s anything else you want to add in.
But just to get the thing rolling we want to talk now about, free speech, obviously a big issue that people are discussing in the United States, in the UK, in various countries. In Mexico, it’s a whole different level of threats to free speech, and the issue of organized crime cartel violence which is not only Mexico it's also the United States it's also Europe it's also global.
So, just to get the ball rolling and starting off, Luis.
So in Mexico itself, people have already seen the news, you've had, you know, more than 150 journalists who have been murdered in Mexico in the last 20 or so years. Most of the cases are unsolved, but the presumption of cartels organized crime, being involved in a large number of those, often with corrupt officials, I mean, so first of all, Luis to start off.
I mean, you grew up doing this, you grew up getting into journalism, when it was all extremely violent. You know a guy being murdered on his lunch break in Ciudad Juarez for the newspaper. What kind of motivated you despite that, to do it anyway, to kind of make a career of not only doing journalism, but doing narco journalism in Mexico.
Luis: Yeah, so first of all, thanks for the kind introduction, Ioan, great to see you here, and great to see Katherine as well, I feel honored to be with with two of the guys that I grew up reading you know your stuff so really, really glad to be here.
And well I think I started off because, yes, I mean, I was literally graduating college, when Ciudad Juarez was labeled the most dangerous city in the world. This was something that I was watching brew as I was growing older.
But then there was this case that really affected me personally, and launched me into this we could call it probably a rabbit hole of finding what happened and why. And those questions. I mean, 15, probably over 15 years later I can’t still find the answers. I think the answers are way more complicated or complex than just a single answer. But what happened is, by the time I was still in college, I was working as a correspondent for EFE news agency, which is, which is a news service in Spanish covering Ciudad Juarez and the border.
And then my editor one night, very late in the night, I think probably it was like one in the morning. He called me and said that there was a multiple murder at a bar that was actually not far from where I was living back then in Ciudad Juarez.
He asked me if I could go there to meet a photographer who was already at scene and try to write a short piece for a hit for that same night, and probably a follow up on the next morning. So I drove my motorcycle, I used to have a motorcycle, showed up to this bar, and the five young guys killed at the spot were all my friends…that really affected me personally, that was something that first threw me into the question of what happened.
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