Alberto Islas Torres
CEO of Risk Evaluation
Islas Torres is CEO of Risk Evaluation, a specialized firm in crisis management and financial risk assessment. His background in political economy has allowed him to develop decision models to understand transnational threats and national security issues such as drug trafficking, arms trade, and organized crime. He has been an advisor to Cabinet members in the security area in Mexico under different administrations, as well as other governments in the region. Currently he is coproducing a documentary on the impact of drug consumption in Mexican society. He received his Master of Science in Political Science, MIT and his BA in Economics, ITAM, Mexico City.
Alejandro Junco de la Vega
Publisher, Grupo Reforma
Alejandro Junco has made it his life’s work to achieve true freedom of speech in the country of his birth. Born in 1948, in Monterrey, Mexico, he was educated both in Mexico and the United States, obtaining his Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin in 1969. He received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humanities from Michigan State University in 2000 and numerous international awards including Columbia´s Maria Moors Cabot Medal. In 1973, he became publisher of El Norte in Monterrey and in the course of thirty years transformed a #2 newspaper in the province to #1 in the nation. Junco has built one of the most powerful newspaper conglomerates in Latin America with dailies in Mexico’s largest cities. Grupo Reforma, as the publishing group is known, has been the most instrumental factor in the evolution of journalism in Mexico in the last 30 years.
Angela Kocherga
Mexico Bureau Chief, Belo Television
Kocherga is the Border Bureau Chief for Belo, a Texas based television news leader with 20 stations across the country.In 2006 amid escalating drug violence, the immigration controversy in the U.S. and concerns about border security, Belo relocated the broadcast bureau from Mexico City to the border. Kocherga is now based in El Paso, a midway point for traveling the southwest border. She also reports from the interior of Mexico. Additionally, Kocherga has covered stories from the Mexico-Guatemala border, Guatemala City and Havana, Cuba. Kocherga was born in Mexico City and raised in Guadalajara and Texas in the Rio Grande Valley. She’s a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin.
Carlos Lauría
Senior Program Coordinator for the Americas,
Committee to Protect Journalists
Originally from Argentina, Lauría began his journalism career in Buenos Aires in 1986. In 1994, Lauría settled in New York as U.S. bureau chief correspondent for the country’s largest magazine publisher, Editorial Perfil. He has been Americas program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) since November 2002. At CPJ, he is responsible for monitoring, documenting and developing responses to press freedom violations in Latin America. As chief strategist and spokesperson for CPJ on media issues in the region, he writes regularly on press issues for media throughout Latin America. He is a journalism graduate of Universidad Católica Argentina.
Mariana Martínez Esténs
Tijuana-based AP Correspondent and Radio Bilingue contributor
Martínez Esténs graduated with honors, M.S. in Journalism, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2006. At Columbia University she wass the winner of the Henry Taylor International Journalism Award, Scripps Howard Foundation Scholarship and the Healy Foundation Scholarship, Cabot International Journalism Scholarship, as well as three prior San Diego Press Club Journalism Awards including Best Newspaper Investigative Report in 2004. She teaches the Border Issues Seminar at Universidad Iberoamericana (Tijuana), has advised the University of Southern California, Annenberg/California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, and served as Mexican Corporate Philanthropy project coordinator, Institute of the Americas, La Jolla, CA.