IRE Audio: Dart Panels on Veterans & Human Rights in Latin America

At the 2014 Investigative Reporters & Editors Conference in San Francisco, the Dart Center hosted panels on human rights and veterans issues. Scroll down to listen to the full audio recordings.

Investigating Human Rights in the Americas

Alberto Arce, Alfredo Corchado, Jeff Kelly Lowenstein and Richard Marosi discussed how to gain access to official and unofficial documents, work sensitively with sources and navigate issues of personal safety in countries where public records are not readily available and reporters face real threats of bodily harm.

Alberto Arce joined the AP in February 2012 as a correspondent in Honduras. Arce grew up in Gijón in northern Spain and has a political science degree from the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. 

Alfredo Corchado was born in Durango, Mexico, grew up as a migrant worker in California and later moved to Texas. He has worked for the Dallas Morning News since 1993, currently serving as Mexico Bureau Chief. He has also worked for The Dallas Morning News in Washington and has covered Cuba.Previously he worked for several news organizations including The Wall Street Journal in Dallas and Philadelphia. His reporting has earned several awards, including The Maria Moors Cabot prize and the Elijah Parrish Lovejoy prize. He was a 2008-09 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He recently published his first nonfiction book, Midnight in Mexico.

Jeff Kelly Lowenstein is a Lecturer in the Journalism Department at Columbia College Chicago and the former database and investigative editor at Hoy. Starting in July 2013 he spent a semester as a Fulbright Scholar at the University Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile. His work has received local, national and international recognition, including an IRE Award in 2013.

Richard Marosi, a staff writer for the LA Times, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013 for his stories on the fate of thousands of illegal immigrants who were deported to Mexico in recent years. He has covered Mexico's drug wars, producing a series on the Sinaloa drug cartel and sharing an Overseas Press Club award. In southeast Los Angeles County, his corruption investigations contributed to the indictment or ouster of more than a dozen politicians and city officials.

Click here to listen to the panel audio.

Investigating Veterans Issues

Aaron Glantz, Michael Phillips and Bruce Shapiro discussed how to tell stories at the local and national level and to dig into the difficulties faced by veterans.

Aaron Glantz is a reporter with The Center for Investigative Reporting. His work has appeared in dozens of national media outlets including The New York Times, the PBS Newshour and ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer. In more than 10 years covering the Iraq War and veterans, Glantz has reported on the sieges of Fallujah and Najaf without U.S. military protection and authored three books, most recently “The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle Against America’s Veterans." Glantz is a 2011 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow. 

Michael M. Phillips has been a reporter in the Washington Bureau of The Wall Street Journal since 1996. Since 2001, he has traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq to cover U.S. troops in the field. At home, he often writes about veterans issues and the aftermath of the wars. He covered the tsunami in Sumatra, the earthquake in Haiti and Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf coast. In 2013, he wrote The Lobotomy Files, a Wall Street Journal series exposing the Veterans Administration's use of drastic brain surgery to treat mentally ill World War II veterans. 

Bruce Shapiro is the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, based at the Columbia Journalism School. An award-winning reporter on human rights, criminal justice and politics, Shapiro is a contributing editor at The Nation and U.S. correspondent for Late Night Live on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. He is the author of “Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America,” and teaches investigative journalism at Yale University.

Click here to listen to the panel audio.