Podcast summary

Violence spills north of the border after the bloodiest year in the war to control drug smuggling through Tijuana. Join journalists from San Diego and Tijuana and a long-time watchdog of border violence to discuss the difficulties faced and methods used by reporters doing their jobs in Tijuana.

Participant(s) Bio

Victor Clark Alfaro is director of the Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana and a lecturer in the Latin American Studies Department at San Diego State University. He has been studying human smuggling patterns across the U.S.-Mexico border for more than 20 years.

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez began his journalism career writing about the arts for, among others, Tijuana's La Tarde newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, and the Chicago Tribune. He later served as senior producer of "These Days," KPBS-FM's daily talk show in San Diego. Adolfo is also an accomplished poet. He has toured nationally with The Taco Shop Poets, the performance poetry troupe he co-founded. His poetry has been published in various journals, and in Geography of Rage: Remembering the Los Angeles Riots of 1992.

Amy Isackson has been the border reporter at KPBS in San Diego since 2004. She covers breaking news and feature stories on California-Mexico border issues and immigration, for local and national broadcast. Since joining KPBS, Amy's work has been recognized with awards from the Associated Press Television-Radio Association of California and Nevada, the California Chicano News Media Association, and the San Diego Press Club. Most recently, she won the Sol Price Prize for Responsible Journalism for her story about high school students smuggling people and drugs across the U.S. Mexico border.

With more than 20 years of experience covering the U.S.- Mexican border, Vicente Calderón is one of the most recongnized reporters in the Tijuana- San Diego region. Calderon began his carrer began in radio but soon changed to television. He was the first journalist based on the Mexican side of the border assigned to cover San Diego's Hispanic community full time for a Tijuana news outlet. He has worked with Spanish language TV stations in Los Angeles as a correspondent and as the main anchor.

Calderon created Tijuanapress.com, the first news web site in Tijuana to cover the border region and produce news content for TV stations and other media in Mexico and the U.S. Until last November, Calderón also anchored TV Azteca's statewide primetime newscast in Baja California. Previously, he anchored newscasts for Telemundo in Los Angeles. He continues to direct Tijuanapress.com.

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