Category: Reportage
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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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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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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…
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Unwilling Smugglers: Roads and Kingdoms
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — On a balmy evening last November, Sahara Khatun boarded the bus from a refugee camp to the port city of Cox’s Bazar. It was the seventh trip she had taken that afternoon, and she hoped it would be her last. Khatun—short, with jet-black hair—wore a light green hijab and small gold…
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The Grave Hunter: Men’s Journal
Guadalupe Contreras knew death was in the field. It was a September morning in 2017, and the 60-year-old former mason had met a dozen or so people, dressed in boots and scruffy jeans, on the outskirts of Veracruz, Mexico at an area called Colinas de Santa Fe. In a sandy pasture, surrounded by green hills, Contreras and…
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How to be Human: Guardian, The Long Read
The first time Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja ever heard voices on the radio, he panicked. “Fuck,” he remembers thinking, “those people have been inside there a long time!” It was 1966, and Rodríguez woke from a nap to the sound of conversation. There was nobody else in the room. The noise seemed to be coming from…
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Father Courage: Guardian, The Long Read
At 4.30am on 22 November 1995, taxi number 69 pulled into the Campsa Red petrol station in La Constancia, a scruffy neighbourhood in the centre of Jerez. The driver stopped at pump 1, got out of his car and dragged the nozzle to its fuel inlet, but the pump wouldn’t turn on. When he went…
Matthew Bremner: Journalist 