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Guillermo Arias
Photographer based in Tijuana.
  • AFP / Guillermo Arias
  • AFP / Guillermo Arias
  • AFP / Guillermo Arias
  • AFP / Guillermo Arias
  • AFP / Guillermo Arias
  • AFP / Guillermo Arias

Telling the story as it is

Tuesday 10 September 2019

AFP photographer Guillermo Arias has won the top prize at photojournalism’s biggest annual festival, the “Visa Pour L’Image,” for his moving coverage of Central American migrants trying to get into the US.

Here Arias, who is based in Tijuana, Mexico and who scooped up the Visa d’Or for News, speaks about the importance of telling a story as honestly and completely and with as little manipulation as possible, especially in the age of ‘fake news’ and deep mistrust of the media.

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  • AFP / Guillermo Arias
  • AFP / Guillermo Arias
  • AFP / Yuri Cortez

The monumental divide

Wednesday 1 March 2017

With debate raging in the United States and Mexico over President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall along the nations’ border, AFP photographers decided to take a closer look. Just what did this border look like? What did the people living and working there think?

So they took 10 days to drive nearly 1,750 miles along the border. Jim Watson, based in Washington, drove on the US side from California to Texas. Guillermo Arias, based in Tijuana, drove on the Mexican side from Baja California to Tamaulipas with Yuri Cortez, based in Mexico City, joining him along the way.

They found drug cartel-inspired fear on the Mexican side, an eerie quiet on the other. Endless desert and farmland stretching to the horizon. Signs of migrants, but, aside from one woman with a baby, none in sight.

They saw Americans crossing into Mexico for cheap medical care and medicine and Mexicans crossing into the US to labor on farms. Teenagers recording music by the river. People deported from the US who lived close to the border because their families remained on the other side. One guy walking along the highway with his dog was thinking of not stopping until the east coast.

They found much apprehension about the proposed wall on both sides of the border. And at times an imposing fence and barriers snaking along much of the frontier.

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About AFP

Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a leading global news agency providing fast, comprehensive and verified coverage of the events shaping our world and of the issues affecting our daily lives. Drawing from an unparalleled news gathering network across 151 countries, AFP is also a world leader in digital verification. With 2,400 staff representing 100 different nationalities, AFP covers the world in six languages, with a unique quality of multimedia storytelling spanning video, text, photos and graphics.

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