The Case for Unbordered Reporting

Early in my career as a journalist, I had dinner with a source who would be assassinated less than two years later. Francisco Piedragil Ayala, president of the state coffee council in Guerrero, Mexico, spoke in slow, deliberate Spanish, his snow-white hair tied back. “I think—no, I know—that you and the young people like you are the light at the end of the darkness we are in,” he said, a gleam in his eye. “The way you are going to illuminate it is by learning. By getting to know.”

We were at a restaurant in Acapulco, where my editor had asked me not to stay out late because he was worried about cartel violence. But I was riveted by Piedragil. As the ocean blackened beside us, I took notes and asked questions. At twenty-two, I had moved to Mexico City to cover soft commodities—coffee, cacao, and other crops—for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. My job was to track their production in Mexico and Central America. But the deeper I went into the mountains and villages, the clearer it became that I wasn’t just reporting on supply chains. I was witnessing the silent machinery behind mass migration.

Piedragil told me that multinational industries were destroying the earth and displacing people. He’d led a longtime resistance to corporate extraction, such as by setting fire to coffee skins destined for Nestlé. When we met, he was helping opium poppy farmers become small-scale quality coffee farmers so that they could be free of the cartels and demand fair prices for their beans. Piedragil told me that the rapacious harvesting of the earth had to end. Otherwise, he said, the earth would become “a machine that will be able to feed only machines.”