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It’s no secret to Mexicans or Colombians that people are disappeared, all the time, often at the hands of cartels and with seemingly no reason. We talked with Daniela Guazo from Mexico’s El Universal about the work she and her team did along with Colombia’s El Tiempo to give a human face to an issue that has affected nearly 100,000 families.
Read a Q&A with highlights from this interview.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Daniela Vidal reported this episode. Lucio Villa of the San Francisco Chronicle was our guest editor for the Spanish version of this episode, along with IRE’s Sarah Hutchins. We are recorded in the studios of KBIA at the University of Missouri.
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The follow is an abbreviated transcript of Daniela Vidal’s interview with Daniel Guazo for the IRE Radio Podcast. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Daniela Vidal (IRE): Could you tell me a little bit about what this project is about, The Disappeared?
Daniela Guazo (El Universal): The objective of this project was to show the stories behind the high numbers of people who have disappeared in Mexico. This is a big problem in Mexico and all of Latin America. We wanted to show all the stories behind that.
DV: If someone isn’t familiar with the word “disappeared,” how would you explain it to them.
DG: Disappearing is a term that in Mexico is difficult to explain, but we found a simple explanation: It’s a person who is not with his or her family, and the family is looking, but you don’t know where he or she is. It’s important because in Mexico there are maybe five different terms to describe disappearing people, and in only two of them the person is considered a victim and the government is investigating. With the others terms, the family does the investigation, not the government.
DV: When you were looking at these numbers, what was going through your mind?
DG: When we found the data and we found a big number - about 26,000 missing - we thought, how can we show that they are not only numbers, they are not only statistics. They are people and they have families. They had a job, a son, a daughter. And we thought, we have the data, the statistics, and we have to find different stories to show the different methods of disappearing a person. Maybe one person just goes to work and disappears. Another person goes to a movie and disappears. We have 31 states and 1 city (in Mexico), so we have 32 stories that we have to find.
DV: So how did you find those stories and people who would be willing to talk to you?
DG: We talked with correspondents at El Universal and they would go to the different states and find stories about missing people. As a team, we did stories about Mexico City, the state of Mexico, and the state of Queretaro. And the others, the correspondents at El Universal did those.
DV: Were some of the correspondents you worked with kind of afraid to go into some of these states, just because of how dangerous it could be?
DG: Yes. They don’t go to states like Tamaulipas or Coahuila or Veracruz. It was very difficult. In fact, in Veracruz it was very difficult to find a story. They called us and said, ‘Maybe in Veracruz there are no missing people.’ But really, there are.
DV: It’s just nobody really wanted to talk about it.
DG: Yeah, nobody wanted to talk about it. They said, ‘I can’t find a story. Nobody wants to tell me a story about missing people.’
DV: So when these families finally did see the story in El Universal, what was their reaction to it?
DG: The families are very grateful to us. They are afraid, but they want someone, anyone to talk to them and hear their stories and to show that they have a big problem with disappearing people. They are afraid at first, but then they are very grateful to see that the media want to hear their stories.
DV: To the people of Mexico, I imagine it’s not a surprise that 26,000 people have been disappeared.
DG: Yeah, sadly it’s not a surprise.
DV: So for them to see, here are individual stories…
DG: The number 26,000 wasn’t a surprise because everybody knows this number. But the stories, yes, those were a surprise. Because when you read the stories, it seems to be something that can happen to anyone.
DV: So is the perception sometimes that the people who are disappeared were involved in criminal activity and so it made sense that they had been taken?
DG: Maybe when people are murdered, maybe they think that they were involved in criminal activity. But when somebody is disappeared, it’s very difficult to find the real reason. And this is why maybe it seems to be something that happens to anyone. A lot of people disappear and have no connection to criminal activity.
DV: Data journalism is really new in Mexico, so was it hard to prove that, hey, this thing we’re doing is really valuable for reporting in this country?
DG: Yeah, it’s very difficult in Mexico because, like you said, in Mexico data journalism is new. Maybe just three or four years old. But with this project, we showed what kind of project we can do. We worked with a programmer, a designer, photographers and correspondents. It was a big team. But with this project, we showed what kinds of stories and products we can create.
For nearly 15 years, a journalism professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has been investigating the case of the Fairbanks Four, a group of men convicted in the 1997 beating death of a teenager. And he hasn’t been working alone. Each year, students in Brian O’Donoghue’s investigative reporting class picked up the case. Their work had a huge impact: In December 2015, the Fairbanks Four were exonerated, freed after nearly two decades behind bars. On this episode, Brian takes us through the investigation.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Aaron Pellish reported this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast. We are recorded in the studios of KBIA at the University of Missouri.
MUSIC
Approximately 2,700 women are serving time at Lowell Correctional Institution, the nation’s largest women’s prison. On this episode, Miami Herald reporter Julie Brown discusses her year-long investigation into Lowell. Documents, interviews and a Facebook page for former inmates helped her expose a world of sexual extortion, abuse and corruption inside the Florida prison.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Daniela Vidal reported this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast. We are recorded in the studios of KBIA at the University of Missouri.
MUSIC
Clip from television newscast (WCTV)
Ambition Pt. I (Alex Fitch)
There are certain pieces of advice you hear over and over again at our annual computer-assisted reporting conference: Get out there, take risks and experiment. So at our recent conference in Denver, we sent University of Missouri journalism student Jack Howard to do just that. On this bonus episode, you’ll hear his five-minute experiment: capturing the NICAR experience and turning it into audible data.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Jack Howard reported and produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast. We are recorded in the studios of KBIA at the University of Missouri.
Chicago drivers have forked over more than $600 million for traffic fines captured by red light cameras. But an investigation by the Chicago Tribune found that the largest robotic camera system in the country hasn’t done much to make the streets safer. Instead, city officials have used Chicago drivers like a network of cash machines. Reporter David Kidwell takes us behind the story.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Aaron Pellish reported and produced this episode. Daniela Vidal is our host. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast. We are recorded in the studios of KBIA at the University of Missouri.
MUSIC
All across America, you can find foreign guest workers peeling crawfish, setting up carnival rides and trimming trees. But the visa program that legally brings them here is rife with problems. On this episode, Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison take us through their BuzzFeed News investigation into H-2 visas, a program that condemns thousands of workers to abuse and exploitation.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Daniela Vidal reported and produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast. We are recorded in the studios of KBIA at the University of Missouri.
MUSIC
On this episode, reporter A.C. Thompson discusses his investigation into the deaths of five Vietnamese-American journalists between 1981 and 1990. Officials seemed to think that an anti-Communist group called the Front had been behind the slayings, but law enforcement agencies never charged anyone and the cases went cold. Thompson reopened the investigation for ProPublica and Frontline, tracking down former members of the Front to try and find out who silenced the press more than 30 years ago.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Aaron Pellish reported this episode. Daniela Vidal introduced the episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
MUSIC
Domestic violence, foster care and mental illness are important issues for journalists to cover. But anytime you’re dealing with families and children, there are ethical decisions to consider. We pulled some of our favorite tips and insights from a panel at the 2015 IRE Conference. IRE members can listen to the entire panel online.
Marisa Kwiatkowski of the Indianapolis Star discussed her process for interviewing families who may be uncomfortable with the subject of the investigation.
Last year, BuzzFeed News’ Alex Campbell wrote about parents charged with “failure to protect” who were suffering just as much as their children. This investigation gave him lots of information about which court documents often contained the behind-the-scenes information he needed.
Karen de Sá, an investigative reporter for The San Jose Mercury News, drew on years of experience to explain the best ways of finding child victims.
She also took great care to emphasize that reporters should be very careful with victims of abuse and shared her knowledge on how to avoid revictimization.
If you attended an IRE Conference in the early 2000s, the plot of the movie "Spotlight" might have sounded familiar. That’s because the Hollywood depiction of the Boston Globe’s investigation into the clergy sex abuse scandal stayed surprisingly true to the real behind-the-scenes story. How do we know? A few of the journalists depicted in the film – Walter Robinson, Marty Baron and Sacha Pfeiffer – discussed the reporting process at conferences in 2002 and 2003. We’re sharing some of that archival audio on this special bonus episode.
As always, you can find us on Soundcloud, iTunes and Stitcher. If you have a story you think we should feature on the show, drop us a note at web@ire.org. We’d love to hear from you.
EPISODE NOTES
Looking for links to the stories, resources and events we discussed on this week's podcast? We've collected them for you.
CREDITS
Adam Aton produced this episode. IRE Web Editor Sarah Hutchins edits the podcast.
MUSIC
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