Mexico City, CDMX, Mexico
$250 - $350 / Day
Request QuoteRafael Castillo is a Mexican journalist and documentary filmmaker. After the mass forced disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero, he focused his reporting on the national humanitarian crisis. He has reported on migration and deportation, internal forced displacement and disappearances, femicides, indigenous political rising for elections and its efforts to install indigenous governments ousting political parties. During his career he was worked as VICE and Reuters, publishing also in BBC, National Geographic, HBO, and Mexican Newspaper El Universal.
Produced for Vice Media
A year after journalist Javier Valdez was murdered, National Geographic and VICE investigate on the state of press freedom and the risk that journalist face in Mexico.
Tijuana, Mexico, is a limbo for deportees from the United States. People keep showing up in the city while U.S. immigration policies get tougher. Between 2002 and 2012, deportations to Mexico more than doubled, from 122,058 to 306,870, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Many were deported for non-violent or relatively minor infractions. In many cases, these deportees are returned to a country where they might have been born but know little about as adults. They might speak little or no Spanish, and are further seen as pariahs for sporting gang tattoos. Opportunities for work in Tijuana remain limited for such deportees, except in a sector that is enjoying a boom period in Mexico, telemarketing. Call centers offer English-speaking deportees a chance to have a steady income in jobs-strapped Mexico. They also get to put their language skills to use. Telemarketers gain a geographically close work-force of English native-speakers, but at Mexican labor costs. VICE News traveled to Tijuana to meet a few of the thousands of deportees who were raised in the United States and are now forming new lives back in Mexico, thanks to their steady jobs at a U.S. call center.
A wave of homicides targeting female victims — labeled as femicides — has been sweeping the State of Mexico, the sprawling suburb that engulfs Mexico City. While government officials have not provided exact figures, the National Citizen Femicide Observatory estimates six women are murdered a day, and a United Nations body has described the situation as a pandemic.
A clandestine grave with more than 300 bodies was uncovered after families of forced disappeared people in Mexico investigated with their own resources. On their path they have faced cartels, corrupt politicians, members of police and armed forces implicated in these crimes.
As the Mexican Navy continues the hunt for fugitive Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman, hundreds of people have been forced to flee the Golden Triangle, the Sinaloa Cartel’s stronghold in Northern Mexico. While refugees claim they fled helicopter gunfire, the navy denies their operation to hunt the most wanted drug lord are out of control.
An armed attack against the indigenous town of Oxchuc, Chiapas, revealed a political conflict that has bring the population to install an indigenous traditional government, and oust the elected mayor and all political parties.
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