Category: Uncategorized
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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 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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Blurred Vision: Men’s Journal
IN THE GRAINY CELL PHONE VIDEO, Sebastian Woodroffe is struggling to stand. Dressed in jean shorts and a black sweatshirt, he’s lying in a puddle, clearly in pain, moaning and gurgling in the blood and the dirt. If he has not embraced his fate, he has at least acknowledged it. Around him, on a soggy, green…
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City of Coffins: Bloomberg Businessweek
Juan Carlos Pacheco and his brother Carlos Stanley begin, as always, by asking the dead man for permission. In the living room of a modest house in eastern El Salvador, Juan Carlos pulls a surgical mask over his face and mouths the plea soundlessly from behind its pleats. Please let me prepare you, so your family…
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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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Chasing Orwell’s Ghost
The dining room was empty save for me, a plate of steaming venison pie, and a chubby waiter. As I chomped the chewy deer the waiter fidgeted with cutlery and waddled between tables like a boat bashed between two waves. He hummed to himself as he set places for patrons who would never come and…
Matthew Bremner: Journalist 