Author: matthewembremner
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Sports Writer by Day, Dissident by Night: Bloomberg Businessweek
Bobomurod Abdullayev was a decent enough sports reporter, but he was a really good politics blogger. Household-name good. Getting-things-done good. So good that he lived in fear of government agents showing up to take him away. For most of the past two decades, Abdullayev kept this second beat a secret from even his wife and…
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Dead Man Walking: 1843 Economist
On a late spring day in 2000, Manuel Ramírez was hosting a dinner at his home in Tepexpan, a dusty industrial town near Mexico City. His firstborn son was one month old, and his family and friends had come to meet him. The guests reclined in wicker armchairs with drinks in their hands and fawned…
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Sacrifice: Hazlitt
One late spring evening in 2018, Justo Gallego Martínez said he would show me his grave. The old man was warming his hands by a stove in the dim back room of his cathedral. A dusty film coated the cement floor. The shelves and tables were full of relics, screws, chipped wood, crushed glass, and half-eaten…
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The Butterfly King: Bloomberg Businessweek
At midday on Jan. 13, 2020, Homero Gómez González, one of Mexico’s most respected conservationists, attended his final meeting. Like most of his appointments, this one was about butterflies. For years, Gómez had been the leading defender of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a collection of sanctuaries in Michoacán, about a two-hour drive west of…
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The Cleaner: Alexander
For a long time now, the end had been the beginning. That was how Donovan Tavera had come to see his work, and that’s what he was thinking as he walked down the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City on a spring day in early 2021. The morning was stifling; a choking hotch-potch of…
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The Death Truck: The Guardian Long Read
On the southern outskirts of Guadalajara, early in the morning of 15 September 2018, a large container, the type normally attached to a lorry, sank into the soupy ground beside a rutted country road. The refrigerated container could store up to 18 tonnes of material, cooled to -40C. Across its white exterior, a cartoon polar…
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The Stowaway: Truly Adventurous
Detective Kirk Sullivan of the Las Vegas Police Department was slumped at his desk behind a looming mound of arrest reports when the phone rang. It was the head of security at the Four Seasons Hotel, and he had a strange story to tell. Sullivan was 205lbs, over 6ft tall, with short, brown hair. He…
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Condemnation and Sympathy: LA Times
MADRID — “Are you sure you want to die?” Ángel Hernández stared at his wife through clear glasses. His face was pallid, haggard, his lip quivering. María José Carrasco, 61, and eight years his junior, drooped in a squeaky red armchair. Her body was limp, her face sunken, and her mouth sagged into a scowl. But…
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A Gas Heist Gone Wrong: Bloomberg Businessweek
The morning before 137 people died in Mexico’s deadliest pipeline explosion, clouds gathered on the horizon above Tlahuelilpan, a town two hours north of Mexico City. As the rising sun flicked the mountains poking out of the flatlands on Jan. 18, locals who worked in the nearby fields or factories left home to earn their…
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Blow Up! : The Guardian Long Read
Around midday on 6 June 2001, locals from Pilar da Bretanha, a parish on the northwestern tip of the Atlantic island São Miguel, saw a white yacht, about 40 feet long, drifting aimlessly near the area’s sheer cliffs. None of the villagers had ever seen a boat of this size floating so close to that…
Matthew Bremner: Journalist 