Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America and the drug war since 2001 for media including the New York Times, Time Magazine, Esquire, BBC, Reuters, Letras Libres and many others. He’s the author of the Narco trilogy of books including “El Narco” (2011), “Gangster Warlords” (2016) and “Blood Gun Money” (2021). He’s worked on documentary series including Narco Wars for NatGeo and Nunca Tuvo Miedo for ViX. Among prizes, he won Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot prize in 2022 for his body work on Latin America.
Deborah Bonello is an investigative journalist and author, and the former Editorial Director for VICE News Latin America. She has been based in the region since 2007 and reported extensively on organized crime for both the media and think tanks. As a female reporter focused on a topic overwhelmingly covered by male journalists, she brings CartelReports a rare, gendered perspective to coverage of organized crime, adding a fresh take on an industry whose history has largely been written by men. She is the author of “NARCAS: The Secret Rise of Women in Latin America’s Cartels.”
Luis Chaparro is a binational journalist and producer based at the U.S.- Mexico border. His work focuses on organized crime, immigration and drugs. Over the last 15 years he has embedded with criminal organizations and Mexican and U.S. law enforcement agencies to report stories about cartels, immigration and binational affairs.
Luis has worked on documentaries for a number of outlets including Netflix, Showtime, and VICE News. His scoops have included a deadly extortion ring inside a Mexican government migrant shelter, and a dispatch from inside the house of El Chapo’s son Ovidio after his cinematic arrest in Culiacan, Sinaloa.