Hello!

Today, I turn twenty-seven. (!!!!) For over three years, I've worked as a writer and independent journalist investigating human rights abuses, corruption, and conflict in Mexico and Honduras for international media. Life is funny: my 27th pass around the sun — several years into a career of documenting abuses south of the border — comes on the heels of the reelection of Donald Trump. But it just so happens I’m moving into the next stage of a longer project on the relationship between the US border and Mexican violence, one that will intensify under the coming administration. So today I’m asking—if you believe in this kind of on-the-ground, investigative journalism, think it’d be meaningful, and can afford it—if you’d be interested in supporting this project.

For over a year, I've been investigating how U.S. border militarization fuels paramilitary conflict south of the U.S.-Mexico border, particularly in Mexico’s expansive Sonoran desert, as well the resulting humanitarian fallout. Over the past thirty years, most US politicians — though none more than Trump — have sought to harden the U.S. southern border into ever more violent impassibility to “deter” the world’s most desperate people from coming to the U.S. It’s never worked. Instead, border militarization has meant inflated profits for paramilitary criminal groups, what we know as “cartels,” who’ve taken over the business of moving desperate people across the border. Fattened off profits from migrant routes, they wage intensifying territorial wars to control them. The fact that Trump is now promising not just the most draconian border crackdown in history but the threat of military force against cartels means these conflicts—where armed groups invariably ignored, targeted, or co-opted by state forces finance themselves through the exploitation of systematically criminalized migrants—will likely reach new levels of bloodshed, humanitarian and political significance. It’s never been more necessary to do critical, on-the-ground, historically-grounded reporting that’s rooted in the voices of victims.

It’s why I’m asking, if this is something you’d want to read, if you’d consider donating to help me return to Sonora to document the effects of U.S border policy in the region. Freelance journalists in the region — like yours truly! — work exhausting hours, doing risky work, for the most part for pennies. Sometimes you have a project you have to get creative to make things work. I last reported in the region in September, 2023, before a major wave of conflict between paramilitary "mafias" controlling migrant routes broke out. (Violence has since ebbed, and I have sources to be able to do this reporting safely). Supplemented by reporting alongside the award-winning Mexican writer and journalist Alam Bernabé before the year’s end, this project would go into two several-thousand word narrative and investigative pieces pre-commissioned by US publications. I’m looking for just over $2,000 — $300 for two roundtrip plane tickets from Mexico City, $850 for a vehicle, $850 for food, gas, and a place to stay — to spend two weeks there, continuing to talk to people in the ‘migrant economy’ as well as Central American migrants, and human rights defenders. Any amount helps though, truly.

If I cared about money, I'd have found another job by now. But though freelancing sucks, I love journalism. And I genuinely believe this work, carefully and accessibly documenting the abuses linked to power structures, can provide a tool for people who want a stronger grasp of subjects as controversial as U.S. border policy in the age of algorithmically-disseminated, politically-motivated disinformation.

-Jared.