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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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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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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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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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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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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
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Rina is accustomed to suffering. She has been sold, trafficked, and has escaped from a foreign country. She has survived diseases and tropical cyclones. She was forced to abandon her son when she was just 20 years old. And now, after everything, her home stands to be washed away by a rising river.
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July 2015: Three months ago in an apartment on the outskirts of Osaka, Japan, Haruki Watanabe died alone. For weeks his body slowly decomposed, slouched in its own fluids and surrounded by fetid, fortnight-old food. He died of self-neglect, solitude, and a suspected heart problem. At 60, Watanabe wasn’t old, nor was he especially poor.
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On 2 September 2003, a Dutchman named Romano van der Dussen walked to the beach in Fuengirola, a resort on Spain’s Costa del Sol. It was noon, and the high-rise apartment blocks along the seafront shimmered in the heat. Van der Dussen opened a can of beer, lay down on his towel and looked out
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The Thurso River cuts through a landscape of murky brown bogs and wind-scorched grass, through mounds of craggy Caithness rock, soggy sphagnum moss, treeless flats, and through the strange silence of the mid-winter afternoon. It is a ghostly body of water, a lonely 26 mile stretch of shimmering slate gray. On one of its sludgy
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Matthew Bremner: Journalist 