As Mexico’s Cartels Expand, Even The Tortilla is A Target
For years, Mexican drug cartels focused their activities on exploiting the U.S. drug market. But they have proven agile businessmen and, in recent years, diversified their illicit activities in increasingly creative and vicious ways. They have gone so far as to create large extortion networks that prey on everything from chicken farms to the tortilla and avocado industries. To photograph this story, I sought to showcase the products being extorted—a live chicken, cigarettes, tortillas—as well as the religious leaders fighting corruption. I traveled across Mexico for the assignment, taking photos in Sinaloa, Cuernavaca and Mexico City. My challenge was to create a visual story about corruption and organized crime through photos of inanimate objects and different processes of production.