Corruption on Trial: Investigating the Honduran Narcostate Through the U.S. Federal Courts
In the past decade, more than a dozen Hondurans from the country's political, security and business circles have been tried for offenses related to drug-trafficking in U.S. federal court. The tens of thousands of pages of records produced in the course of these trials provide an extraordinarily rich portrait of the role of narcotrafficking in Honduran politics and security forces, and in cross-border businesses and money-flows. A binational team of investigative journalists, Danielle Mackey and Jennifer Ávila, are building a database to make this information available to journalists, academics, activists, and the general public, as they pursue their own journalistic investigations into the material. Once finished, the database will be hosted online at Contracorriente, the Honduran media outlet at which Ávila is Editor-in-Chief. This year, CeMeCA will provide student interns for the project and help the project leaders connect to relevant resources elsewhere in the University.
Join us for a conversation with the project’s leaders and other experts to learn about this innovative effort in pursuit of transparency.
Panelists:
- Danielle Mackey, Independent Journalist
- Jennifer Ávila, Co-founder and director of Contracorriente
- Dr. Pamela Ruiz, Criminologist specialized in Central America
- Dr. Amelia Frank-Vitale, Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer, Program in Latin American Studies, Princeton
Click HERE to register.
Corruption on Trial is one of several Applied-Academic Projects supported by Columbia's Center for Mexico and Central America (CeMeCA).
