Alfredo Corchado Jiménez is a Mexican-American journalist and author who has covered Mexico for many years, and is currently the Mexico City bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News. He specializes in covering the drug wars 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 but calls the border home.
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.