Alfredo Corchado Jiménez is a Mexican-American journalist and author who has covered the U.S.-Mexico Border for decades. He is currently the executive director of Puente News Collaborative, an El Paso-based non-profit focused on journalism from the border region, and previously served as the Mexico City bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News. He specializes in covering the drug wars, immigration, and the U.S.-Mexico border, writing stories on topics such as drug cartels and organized crime, corruption among police and government officials, and the spread of drug cartels into U.S. cities.
The Nieman Foundation for Journalism has noted that he has "described mass shootouts that no one else writes about, obtained and described videos of revenge executions, and revealed how the few arrested for the mass murder of women in Juárez are often innocent stooges." Howard Campbell, author of Drug War Zone, has called Corchado "the top American journalist covering Mexico today" whose "knowledge of the Mexican political system, the drug trade, and modern Mexican society is non-pareil." Corchado currently lives between El Paso and Mexico City.
Early life and education Corchado was born in Durango, Mexico as the oldest of eight children, and was raised in California and Texas. When he was five years old, his mother, in despair over an accident in which his younger sister died, decided to leave Mexico. Taking him and his siblings, she and his father migrated legally to the United States when he was six to the San Joaquin Valley in California, where Corchado's parents became migrant farm workers. He worked the fields alongside his parents, who were members of the United Farm Workers union led by Cesar Chavez. When he was thirteen, PBS interviewed him for a piece on the lives of migrant workers.
Corchado later recalled "the fact that there were people interested in our situation, and how we lived, and the fact that the fields had no water, there were no toilets...just the fact that anybody cared, and they were interested in giving us a voice―I think that always kind of stayed with me as a kid." He has also written, however, that before his interest in journalism he had aspiration of becoming a songwriter.
Corchado's family later moved to El Paso, Texas, where they ran a restaurant called Fred's Cafe. He graduated from El Paso Community College in 1984 and graduated from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1987 with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. Corchado later said that his parents felt that he, as the oldest child, should set an example for his younger siblings, and that UT at El Paso was the perfect place to prepare for a career as a foreign correspondent because it is situated "right on the border, so that when you park your car and walk to the campus you're looking at another country right before your eyes." He has stated that most Americans "don't really know Mexico," but UT at El Paso was a "unique place" that provided "a bridge between these two countries," which he desired in his journalism.
Corchado credited his mother with having encouraged him to return to school and making it possible for him "to leave the fields." When told that he was not cut out for journalism, he had considered becoming the manager of his parents' restaurant. "But I realized how much I loved being a journalist." And so he continued his pursuit of journalism.
Career Corchado also stated that his dream of a career in journalism was largely based on the hopes of finding the roots of his homeland. According to different accounts, Corchado's parents were supportive of his journalism, but did not want him to report on drug trafficking. Corchado has said that he tried to avoid writing about the drug wars "until the issue was something you couldn't ignore anymore."
Corchado worked on the U.S.-Mexico border for Public Radio, later becoming a reporter for the Standard-Examiner in Ogden, Utah; the El Paso Herald-Post; and The Wall Street Journal, based in its Philadelphia and Dallas bureaus. Because the Journal would not send him to Mexico, he eventually decided to take a job at the Dallas Morning News.
He went to work for the Morning News in 1994, based in Mexico. He traveled around Cuba extensively on many occasions, reporting on a range of topics, before helping to open the newspaper's Havana bureau, which was one of the first U.S. news bureaus to be established in that country.
He left Mexico for Washington in 2000, convinced "that the election of an opposition government, the end of 71 years of one party rule, signaled the automatic birth of democratic institutions" in Mexico. However, he later remarked that organized crime took power and began buying off agencies ranging from police to the media, becoming the de facto rulers of the country.
Accordingly, after working from 2000 to 2003 out of the Morning News’s Washington, D.C., bureau, he returned to Mexico to serve as the newspaper's Mexico City bureau chief. He was the Morning News's lead reporter during Mexico's 2000 presidential election, was the first to interview the newly elected President Vicente Fox, and was one of a small group of experts who briefed then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton before her first trip to Mexico. But the abiding preoccupation of his journalism has been with the U.S.-Mexico border and the drug wars.
Late in 2003, he began covering a series of killings of women in Ciudad Juárez. His discovery that the Juárez cartel and a U.S. informant had played roles in the killings led to an internal U.S. inquiry and to the removal of high-ranking officials in the Immigration Customs Enforcement agency. In 2005, his reporting on drug violence led him to the discovery that crimes had been committed in Texas on the orders of the Zetas, a Mexican paramilitary group.
Corchado wrote in May 2012 that with the U.S. economy in a downturn, "Mexicans are increasingly staying in their hometowns, finding jobs and carving out a livelihood, or...migrating inside Mexico in search of work." Largely thanks to a successful tourism campaign, he noted, Mexico's south is "booming" – so prosperous that, according to one Mexican working there, it "doesn't feel like Mexico." He wrote an article in November 2012 celebrating the fact that the city of Juárez "is indeed moving forward". In November 2012, he wrote that Enrique Peña Nieto, who was about to be sworn in as president, "takes over a nation of nearly 117 million with a resurgent economy that has become one of the most competitive in the world, surpassing Brazil in annual growth rate. Drug killings, which have been the top priority for Mexicans, aren’t over by any means, but they appear to be receding."
Interviewed on NPR in November 2012, shortly after the presidential election in Mexico, Corchado described the country as "very divided. They have very high expectations that Pena Nieto will somehow bring down the violence, somehow the economy will grow. I mean there is, at this point, zero migration to the United States, but they're hoping that even if the United States economy picks up, that Mexicans will still be able to stay in Mexico and build – keep building on that middle class society and transform into a country of rule of law."
Books Corchado is the author of Midnight in Mexico: A Reporter’s Journey, which was published in 2013 by Penguin.
Corchado has explained that "shortly after returning to Mexico, I received an offer to write a book, with the working title, Midnight in Mexico, which would mean more time away from work." Although concerned his editors would not want him to write it, they fully supported it, and expressed to him the importance of writing the book.
His book Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries, and the Fate of the Great Mexican-American Migration, was published on June 5, 2018, by Bloomsbury. The book covers the story of the great Mexican American migration spanning the late 1980s to today, drawing from the experiences of Alfredo and three of his closest friends: David Suro Piñera, a restaurant owner and tequila connoisseur, Ken, a successful litigator involved in the Philadelphia political scene, and Primo, a human rights activist fighting for causes on both sides of the border. "That night we began a conversation that has lasted more than thirty years, turning on a fundamental and deeply personal question," writes Corchado, "How do we fit in? What does it mean to be American and become part of its diverse mainstream, integrate into its colorful tapestry, its noble ideals and timeless democratic principles?" Corchado's book has been praised by many including David Axelrod, who commented, "This personal, moving tale illuminates the very heart of the polarizing immigration debate that is roiling America today." Publishers Weekly praised Homelands, stating, "In addition to providing historical context for the current debate on immigration, this book is a timely and personal meditation on the concept of "migrant" in the United States."
Other professional activities Corchado has participated in many symposia and other such events in both the U.S. and Mexico, and has appeared on television and radio a number of times in both countries.
He took part in the U.S.-Mexico Forum in February 2008 at the University of California, Berkeley, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation in collaboration with the International Studies Department at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). He spoke on "How to Report in Mexico Without Being Jailed, Kidnapped or Killed."
In 2009, he took part in a forum on the Mexican drug war at Stanford University.
In 2010 he took part in a panel discussion at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington on the press freedom crisis in Mexico. He told the audience that "I was recently in Ciudad Juárez with a photojournalist who covered Bosnia, Baghdad, and Kabul and she said, this is worse than covering those places. At least there you had a sense of who's who. Here you're covering ghosts."
At a 2012 Logan Symposium on investigative journalism at UC Berkeley, Corchado took part in a panel discussion on the topic "When the Story Bites Back."
Corchado has discussed the drug war several times on WBUR radio and on The World, a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston.
Danger and death threats Corchado has had his life threatened on numerous occasions, and has had to leave Mexico for short periods of time to ensure his safety. Despite this, he has continued to his work, Corchado has also stated that Ciudad Juárez, the city in which he covered his first story, was also the place he received death threats due to his journalism work in the city.