Alfredo Corchado is a well-known Mexican-American journalist who, since the mid-1980s, has covered important issues in Mexico and U.S.- Mexico border cities. Corchado is the current Mexico bureau chief of The Dallas Morning News. Born in the northern state of Durango, Mexico, he reluctantly migrated to the U.S. with his family in 1966 when his father found work through the Bracero program. Corchado worked alongside his family in the fields while attending school. After flunking out of high school, with the encouragement of a concerned English teacher and his family, he pursued a college education in journalism (Corchado, p xi). In 1986, he became a reporter for the El Paso Herald Post (Corchado, p xi). Attrition of staff reporters due to a decline in the newspaper industry provided Corchado an opportunity to cover drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) in Mexico. His roots ran deep however, and in 1994, Corchado returned to his country of origin to live and work as an American journalist in Mexico City (Corchado, p x). From there he wrote about politics, tourism, and the influx of U.S. expats in Mexico while also covering expansion, growth, and violence of drug networks. By 2007, he and his girlfriend Angela, a U.S. television reporter who was also born in …show more content…
Due to recent declines in border violence, he assumed the Peace Pact was in place and assumed everyone knew about the pact (Corchado, p 6). His reluctance to immediately leave the country also hinged on a stubborn, complicated, emotional attachment to Mexico involving pride and family heritage. Although he was a dark-skinned Chicano, he was a U.S. citizen and a journalist. He knew Mexican journalists who had been threatened by Los Zetas (including himself) and many Mexican journalists had been murdered in the past (Watt and Zepeda, p 5). At times, U.S. citizenship had given Corchado a sense of immunity, however, deep down he knew he was as vulnerable as any journalist in