A Conversation with Óscar Martínez

[ Photo © Peter Hader 2010 ]

Foreseeable Flight

A Conversation with Óscar Martínez

Award-winning journalist Óscar Martínez will talk about his latest book, El Niño de Hollywood: Cómo Estados Unidos y El Salvador Moldearon a Un Sicario en la Mara Salvatrucha 13 (The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman), gangs in Central America, and the role the United States plays in the crisis of violence in Central America that leads to migrants fleeing the region. Martínez writes for ElFaro.net, the first online newspaper in Latin America. He is also the author of A History of Violence: Living and Dying in Central America and The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, for which he won the WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award in 2013, among many others. Martínez is currently writing chronicles and articles for El Faro’s project, Sala Negra, investigating gang violence in Latin America. The conversation will be moderated by Kenneth Maffitt.

Free and open to the public. Light lunch served. Co-sponsored by the Duke University Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Consortium in Latin America and Caribbean Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke University, the Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University Libraries, Duke’s Forum for Scholars and Publics, and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.