It became quite difficult to convince editors to take stories on Mexico, the last big project that I worked on was for Al Jazeera America — about striking women workers in the Lexmark Maquiladora, a manufacturing plant US, Chinese and Taiwanese companies set up in Mexico, paying slave wages to the workers. And the same day that the story was published Al Jazeera America went out of business. It was one of the few media outlets that would look at a story that was a bit different.

Americans prefer to think that everything is okay in Mexico, the country is reforming, opening up, active on the oil market, has a good record on human rights, when in reality the situation is exactly the opposite. Acapulco used to be a major tourist area, there used to be lots of people coming from the United States with their families for vacation, US students coming for their spring break, but now it has gone to hell and hardly anybody goes there. And even publishing stories about it is extremely difficult.