Anabel Hernández – författare

With contributions from seven of Mexico's finest journalists, this is reportage at its bravest and most necessary - it has the power to change the world's view of their country, and by the force of its truth, to start to heal the country's many sorrows.Supported the Arts Council Grant's for the Arts Programme and by PEN PromotesVeering between carnival and apocalypse, Mexico has in the last ten years become the epicentre of the international drug trade. The so-called "war on drugs" has been a brutal and chaotic failure (more than 160,000 lives have been lost). The drug cartels and the forces of law and order are often in collusion, corruption is everywhere. Life is cheap and inconvenient people - the poor, the unlucky, the honest or the inquisitive - can be "disappeared" leaving not a trace behind (in September 2015, more than 26,798 were officially registered as "not located"). Yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno and Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution and Mexico's street children. Anabel Hernández and Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the "disappearance" of forty-three students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio González Rodríguez and Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death. Reading these accounts we begin to understand the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it.

The product of five years of investigative reporting, the subject of intense national controversy, and the source of death threats that forced the National Human Rights Commission to assign two full-time bodyguards to Anabel Hernández, The Lords of el Narco has been a publishing and political sensation in Mexico.The definitive history and anatomy of the drug cartels and the "war on drugs" that has cost more than 50,000 lives in just five years, the book explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. Hernández reveals the complicity of Mexico's government and business elite. At every turn, she names names-not just the narcos and their immediate accomplices, but also the politicians, policemen, functionaries, judges and entrepreneurs who have collaborated with them.Hernández became a journalist after her father was kidnapped and killed and the police refused to investigate without a bribe. She gained national prominence in 2001 with her exposure of pharaonic spending on housekeeping at the presidential palace. All her previous books have also focused on corruption at the summit of power, under presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón.

On September 26, 2014, 43 male students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. On route to a protest, local police intercepted the students and a confrontation ensued. By the morning, they had disappeared without a trace. Hernández reconstructs almost minute-by-minute the events of those nights in late September 2014, giving us what is surely the most complete picture available: her sources are unparalleled, since she has secured access to internal government documents that have not been made public, and to video surveillance footage the government has tried to hide and destroy. Hernández demolishes the Mexican state's official version, which the Peña Nieto government cynically dubbed the "historic truth". As her research shows, state officials at all levels, from police and prosecutors to the upper echelons of the PRI administration, conspired to put together a fake case, concealing or manipulating evidence, and arresting and torturing dozens of "suspects" who then obliged with full "confessions" that matched the official lie. By following the role of the various Mexican state agencies through the events in such remarkable detail, Massacre in Mexico shows with exacting precision who is responsible for which component of this monumental crime.