Sebastian Rotella and Ana Arana, Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala. ProPublica and Fundación MEPI, 25 May 2012. “In 1982 amid Guatemala’s brutal civil war, 20 army commandos invaded the jungle hamlet of Dos Erres disguised as rebels. The squad members, called Kaibiles, cut their way through the town, killing more than 250 people. Only a handful survived. One, a 3-year-old boy, was abducted by a Kaibil officer and raised by his family. It took 30 years for Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda to learn the truth.”
Archives for May 2012
May 24, 2012
Central Park Five, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, 2012
Central Park Five, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon
THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE [2012, 119 minutes], a new film from award-winning filmmaker Ken Burns, tells the story of the five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park in 1989. Directed and produced by Burns, David McMahon and Sarah Burns, the film chronicles the Central Park Jogger case, for the first time from the perspective of the five teenagers whose lives were upended by this miscarriage of justice.
On April 20, 1989, the body of a woman barely clinging to life is discovered in Central Park. Within days, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam confess to her rape and beating after many hours of aggressive interrogation at the hands of seasoned homicide detectives. The five serve their complete sentences, between 6 and 13 years, before another man, serial rapist Matias Reyes, admits to the crime, and DNA testing supports his confession.
Set against the backdrop of a city beset by violence and facing deepening rifts between races and classes, THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE intertwines the stories of these five young men, the victim, police officers and prosecutors, and Matias Reyes, unraveling the forces behind the wrongful convictions. The film illuminates how law enforcement, social institutions, and media undermined the very rights of the individuals they were designed to safeguard and protect.
Additional resource: Democracy Now!, “‘Central Park Five’: New Film on How Police Abuse, Media Frenzy Led to Jailing of Innocent Teens,” 28 November 2012.
May 23, 2012
Grace in Broken Arrow: A child sex abuse scandal at a Christian school in Oklahoma
Kiera Feldman, Grace in Broken Arrow. This Land Press, 23 May 2012. This is a story about how Grace Fellowship Christian School outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, handled a child sex abuse scandal. Nieman Storyboard: “In wrapping the piece around the larger culture of evangelicalism and consequences of abuse, [Feldman] elevates the story beyond the sensationalism that can sink a sex-scandal story.”
May 6, 2012
Playing With Fire: Chemical companies, Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home
Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe, Playing With Fire: Chemical companies, Big Tobacco and the toxic products in your home. Chicago Tribune, 6 May 2012. Six-part series published between 6 May and 30 December 2012. This series won the Nieman Foundation’s 2012 Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Newspapers and was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. “The average American baby is born with 10 fingers, 10 toes and the highest recorded levels of flame retardants among infants in the world. The toxic chemicals are present in nearly every home, packed into couches, chairs and many other products. Two powerful industries — Big Tobacco and chemical manufacturers — waged deceptive campaigns that led to the proliferation of these chemicals, which don’t even work as promised.”
Winner of the 2013 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
May 1, 2012
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, Steve Coll, 1 May 2012
Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, Steve Coll, 2012
In Private Empire Steve Coll investigates the largest and most powerful private corporation in the United States, revealing the true extent of its power. ExxonMobil’s annual revenues are larger than the economic activity in the great majority of countries. In many of the countries where it conducts business, ExxonMobil’s sway over politics and security is greater than that of the United States embassy. In Washington, ExxonMobil spends more money lobbying Congress and the White House than almost any other corporation. Yet despite its outsized influence, it is a black box.
Private Empire pulls back the curtain, tracking the corporation’s recent history and its central role on the world stage, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and leading to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The action spans the globe, moving from Moscow, to impoverished African capitals, Indonesia, and elsewhere in heart-stopping scenes that feature kidnapping cases, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin. At home, Coll goes inside ExxonMobil’s K Street office and corporation headquarters in Irving, Texas, where top executives in the “God Pod” (as employees call it) oversee an extraordinary corporate culture of discipline and secrecy.
The narrative is driven by larger than life characters, including corporate legend Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond, ExxonMobil’s chief executive until 2005. A close friend of Dick Cheney’s, Raymond was both the most successful and effective oil executive of his era and an unabashed skeptic about climate change and government regulation.. This position proved difficult to maintain in the face of new science and political change and Raymond’s successor, current ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, broke with Raymond’s programs in an effort to reset ExxonMobil’s public image. The larger cast includes countless world leaders, plutocrats, dictators, guerrillas, and corporate scientists who are part of ExxonMobil’s colossal story.
The first hard-hitting examination of ExxonMobil, Private Empire is the masterful result of Coll’s indefatigable reporting. He draws here on more than four hundred interviews; field reporting from the halls of Congress to the oil-laden swamps of the Niger Delta; more than one thousand pages of previously classified U.S. documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act; heretofore unexamined court records; and many other sources. A penetrating, newsbreaking study, Private Empire is a defining portrait of ExxonMobil and the place of Big Oil in American politics and foreign policy.