Foreign Affairs- How Street Gangs Took Central America
The first U.S. story to document the growth of Central American gangs and their operations in the U.S. and Central America.
- Reporter / Journalist
Washington, DC, USA
3 reviews$500 - $500 / Day
Request QuoteAna Arana is a freelance investigative journalist and media trainer based in Washington, D.C. Between 2010 and 2015, she was director of Fundacion MEPI, a Mexico City investigative journalism project, which promoted long-form binational and regional investigative projects. Her work has appeared in ProPublica, This American Life, Foreign Affairs and others. Arana has received several awards for outstanding journalism, including a team award from the Online News Association in 2011, a Third Coast Audio Festival Silver Award in 2012, a Peabody award, two Overseas Press Club awards and an honorable mention from the Scripps Howard’s Ernie Pyle Award in 2013, and a regional Edward R. Morrow Award in 2015. Arana’s international experience includes working stints in the Americas, Africa and Asia. She is a former U.S. foreign correspondent who reported from Central America and Colombia. In the late 1990’s, Arana was worked for the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, authoring investigative reports, including one on the unsolved murders of Vietnamese and Haitian journalists working in immigrant communities in the United States. She is a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
The first U.S. story to document the growth of Central American gangs and their operations in the U.S. and Central America.
In 1982 amid Guatemala’s brutal civil war, 20 army commandos invaded the jungle hamlet of Dos Erres disguised as rebels. The squad members, called Kaibiles, cut their way through the town, killing more than 250 people. Only a handful survived. One, a 3-year-old boy, was abducted by a Kaibil officer and raised by his family. It took 30 years for Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda to learn the truth.
In a forgotten massacre during Guatemala’s decades-long civil war, a young boy was spared, only to be raised by one of the very soldiers who killed his family. Nearly 30 years after the tragedy, it will take a dedicated team – from a forensic scientist to a young Guatemalan prosecutor – to uncover the truth and bring justice to those responsible…by finding the missing boy named Oscar.
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