Martin Langfield's Blog

I wrote an article for my friends at News Decoder about the age-old balance between security and freedom, and how the increasingly dictatorial Nayib Bukele in El Salvador should be a cautionary tale, not an inspiration, for his admirers in the United States.

Borderlands, in many cultures, can be places of transformation — and danger. You might find a new life. You might simply vanish. You might die. That’s rarely been truer than for people trying to reach and cross the U.S. border from the south right now.

Here’s an article I wrote about migration and America for News Decoder.

Here’s an article I wrote recently about cycles of generational violence and trauma for my good friends at News Decoder. It’s about El Salvador, where I worked in the early 1990s, but it could be about many other places too. Repression and violence breed future trauma, and where trauma is unresolved there is no lasting peace.

My 1990 Reuters piece (as printed here in the L.A. Times) was prescient, sadly, about the mental fallout of El Salvador’s civil war. May other warring nations do better.

I wrote a piece on Latin America’s protests in late 2019 – and why they matter, especially to young people – for my good friends at News-Decoder.  Here’s a link! I think it stands up quite well still.

Photo by Martin Langfield, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1986.

(I took this photo more than 30 years ago at an opposition hunger strike to demand fair elections in Chihuahua, Mexico in 1986.)

Reuters journalist Danish Siddiqui was killed on Friday while covering a clash between Afghan security forces and Taliban fighters near a border crossing with Pakistan. This gallery showcases some of his best work.
— Read on mobile.reuters.com/news/picture/i-shoot-for-the-common-man-danish-siddiq-idUSRTXEG1OW

Professional spooks know what a powerful tool disinformation is.

She was an intelligence analyst at the CIA. Now she writes about the dangers of ‘fake news.’

Professional spooks know what a powerful tool disinformation is.

She was an intelligence analyst at the CIA. Now she writes about the dangers of ‘fake news.’

I wrote a piece on Latin America’s protests in late 2019 – and why they matter, especially to young people – for my good friends at News-Decoder.  Here’s a link! I think it stands up quite well still.

Photo by Martin Langfield, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1986.

Important work here from the good people at First Draft: