Author of the week: Alfredo Corchado

last updated 8 January 2015

Journalist Alfredo Corchado is man enough to admit that his mother knew his beat better than he did, said Jake Silverstein in Texas Monthly. When the Dallas Morning News reporter began covering his native Mexico in the early 1990s, he was a young idealist expecting to write upbeat stories about the ties that bind Mexico to its northern neighbor. Instead, Corchado assumed a front-row seat for the corruption and drug violence that he’s now chronicled in his new book, Midnight in Mexico. Six years ago, he fully woke to grim reality when word reached him that the Zetas cartel planned to kill him. “It was the fourth threat I’d received, but the first [that I heard about through] someone I trusted,” he says. And the threat humbled him as much as it frightened him: His mother, who’d brought her children to America decades earlier, had always told Corchado he was crazy to want to go back to Mexico. “That night, after I got the threat, I felt like, ‘Damn, she was right.’”

Not that Corchado has given up hope about the nation’s future, said Keven Ann Willey in The Dallas Morning News. “Hopes for a better Mexico are often dashed but always renewed because of the resilience of the people I cover,” he says. Despite the ongoing violence and the recent return to power of the paternalistic Institutional Revolutionary Party, Corchado sees “a new society” rising, and he’s determined to continue reporting about it. “I always come back,” he says. “More than anything, it is because I need to be on both sides of the border to feel complete.”