I heard the author of this piece (posted below), Christy Thornton, on Democracy Now today. She presents an original and incisive analysis, both in her essay and in the Democracy Now interview…   For so long, I have cringed at the coverage of Mexico’s human rights catastrophe presented as a drug war telenovela. So much popular journalism presents this disaster that has cost the lives of at least 300,000 people, as a series of gory and funny anecdotes that depict the violence in Mexico as the product of “kingpins” and their entitled “juniors” who behave as evil clowns and spoiled rich kids.  This story should not be about the perpetrators, but about the hundreds of thousands of victims who are criminalized at the moment of their deaths. A lot of the mainstream coverage of these tales gets converted into the fictions of novels, movies, TV series’  that now @realdonaldtrump spews back at us as his warped reality…  https://www.vox.com/2019/1/27/18198729/women-duct-tape-trump-truck-border And: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/17/trumps-stories-taped-up-women-smuggled-into-us-are-divorced-reality-experts-say/?utm_term=.ee992d8b604d

As I’ve recommended here before, see the daily coverage by Keegan Hamilton at VICE NEWS, @keeganhamilton on twitter.  Also Alan Feuer of the New York Times @alanfeuer  and pieces in The Guardian by Ed Vulliamy, most recently: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/02/el-chapo-trial-revealed-betrayal-torture-bribe