A conversation with Marcela Turati, Thelma Gómez Durán, and Claudio Lomnitz.

Join Boston Review and Equator for this online event with Marcela Turati, Thelma Gómez Durán, and Claudio Lomnitz. 

Earlier this year Quinto Elemento Lab, a Mexican journalism collective, published an explosive investigative story into forced labour camps run by drug cartels in the Sierra Tarahumara mountains of Chihuahua. Over five years, Marcela Turati, Thelma Gómez Durán and Eliezer Budasoff located and interviewed victims of this criminal operation – men who were kidnapped, held in captivity, and made to cultivate drugs under extreme conditions, without pay, until they nearly died. Their exposé caused a storm in Mexico, and President Claudia Sheinbaum was questioned about the report at a press conference.

An English version of the report later appeared in Equator. Now Turati and Durán will discuss their findings with the Mexican anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz. His recent Boston Review article covers the persistence of slavery in Mexico and its possible links to the tens of thousands currently disappeared.

Subscribe to Boston Review and Equator to read our latest work in print. For a limited time, you can get both magazines in print (list price $138) for just $100.

To subscribe, just add a BR membership to your cart in our online store and use the code EQUATOR. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Thelma Gómez Durán is a journalist specialising in stories about human rights and the environment. She has coordinated investigations such as ”Los Explotadores del Agua” and “A estas personas las desaparecieron por defender el ambiente y el territorio,” and she is a contributor to Quinto Elemento Lab and Mongabay Latam.

Claudio Lomnitz is Campbell Family Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. His latest book is Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico. His essay "Slavery Pure and Simple" is featured in the latest issue of Boston Review.

Marcela Turati is a Mexican journalist who covers human rights violations and enforced disappearances. She is the cofounder of the investigative media outlet Quinto Elemento Lab, the coordinator of the news website A dónde van los desaparecidos, and the author of San Fernando: Última Parada and Fuego Cruzado: Las Víctimas Atrapadas en la Guerra del Narco, about the victims of the Mexican drug war. Her awards include the Iberoamericano Gabo for Lifetime Achievement and Anna Politkovskaya-Arman Soldin Prize for Courage in Journalism.

ABOUT BOSTON REVIEW AND EQUATOR

Boston Review is a magazine of ideas, politics, and culture. Independent and nonprofit since 1975, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world. Our essays, book reviews, criticism, and analysis take a special interest in matters of injustice, from war, poverty, and mass incarceration to the many faces of inequality and threats to democracy and human rights.

Our 50-year archive includes work by leading writers, intellectuals, and activists, including Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, Vivian Gornick, Martha Nussbaum, Elaine Scarry, Arundhati Roy, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robin D. G. Kelley, Pankaj Mishra, Eqbal Ahmad, Sadiq Al-Azm, Seyla Benhabib, Jhumpa Lahiri, Christopher Hitchens, Cornel West, Elias Khoury, Nancy Fraser, Frances Fox Piven, Staughton Lynd, Manning Marable, Sarah Schulman, and Adrienne Rich, among many others.

Founded in 2025, Equator is a magazine of politics, culture and art. Our mission is to hold up a mirror to a global audience of readers and writers who don’t yet recognise themselves as belonging together. All of us have had intimations of our overlapping identities and affinities, our participation in a shared global history, even while separated by narrow nationalisms and parochial press cultures. For us, the widely proclaimed “end of the West” is not the end of the world; the epoch ahead is ripe with the promise of fresh illuminations, of new horizons of human action and imagination.

Equator’s contributors include Hisham Matar, JM Coetzee and Arundhati Roy. Alongside the magazine, we host regularly events, reading groups and seminars. Find out more and subscribe at equator.org.

DETAILS

This event is free and open to the public. But when you register, please consider making a small contribution of $15—or any amount you can donate—to help fund future events like this and the work of Boston Review and Equator. Event registrants will be added to our email newsletter lists.