Chantal Flores

Chantal Flores, a Mexican freelance journalist, has traveled throughout Central America writing stories about people in extraordinary situations.

In 2010, after visiting Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, she settled in Zapotitlán Palmas, Oaxaca, a rural community in southern Mexico being emptied out by emigration. There, she taught a creative writing workshop at the local middle school and posted her students’ work on a bilingual blog called Words of Resistance.

Flores has also reported from her hometown, Monterrey, on the plight of Honduran immigrants en route to the United States trapped by increased border security in that northern Mexico city.

Her work has appeared in Vice, Rolling Stone Mexico, In These Times, and Upworthy. She traveled to Guyana as the recipient of the Canadian Hunger Foundation's Jay Telfer Award for her work educating young people about sustainable development, and she was recently selected for a nonfiction writing residency at the Carey Institute for Global Good in Rensselaerville, New York.

These days, Flores lives in Mexico City and is working on a book about parents looking for the hidden graves of their children, some of the army of people who have gone missing in her country’s horrendous drug-related violence. Human Rights Watch has documented hundreds of so-called enforced disappearances in Mexico since 2007.

In all, thousands of Mexicans have vanished or been killed or displaced since former President Felipe Calderón took office in 2016 and declared war on drug cartels. Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, has vowed to continue the crackdown. The abuses have been committed by security forces and gangsters alike, with very few prosecuted, thanks to the country’s widespread corruption. Mexico ranks toward the middle of 168 countries in Transparency International’s most recent annual Corruption Perceptions Index.

Attacks on journalists, activists, and students have increased significantly in the past years. Ninety-four journalists have been killed since 2000 and dozens more attacked and threatened, with journalists in small or midsize cities the most vulnerable, according to Article 19, a human rights and free press watchdog.

As a woman reporter in a macho culture, Flores has been harassed and intimidated while on assignment. Being a freelancer, without the backing of a media organization, can make her especially vulnerable, but she chose to go it alone to “put large corporate interests aside, and instead be accountable to readers.”

“This kind of journalism is truly in the public interest and, in Mexico, it’s necessary [in order] to create stories that include perspectives that are sometimes neglected or censored,” she says.

In exploring the families’ search for their loved ones, Flores says she is “reporting and writing about one of the biggest crises that my country has faced. I cannot imagine myself watching everything that’s happening in my environment, and not writing about it, or investigating, or asking questions.

“As a freelance journalist, the main motivation is to find the story, or the angle of a story, that big media or elite journalists are not covering,” she says. “I’m not looking for stories that feed the 24-hour news cycle, but stories about systemic issues, deeply rooted in our society, that need to be addressed with all their complexities.”

Click here to see Chantal Flores's reporting proposal.