The flour hangs in the air like snow. Thick, white, everywhere. On the floor, on the shelves, on the hair of Stanisław Nowak, who for forty-five years has been getting up at three in the morning to bake bread for his district. He is seventy-two years old, but his hands – wrinkled, covered with scars from burns – move with the precision of a surgeon.
The Desert’s Silent Witnesses: Fossils Amidst the Search for the Missing
What could the search for a disappeared person in the desert of Ciudad Juárez have in common with a millions-of-years-old marine fossil? This intriguing question brought students from various disciplines at the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez (UACJ) to a packed auditorium in Sala D3-202 on Thursday, September 2, 2026. The occasion was a talk titled “Unearthing, the peaceful past of ‘the most violent city in the world’.”
For nearly two hours, Aracely Lazcano, Gustavo Cabullo, and Juan Antonio Castillo, the authors of the report published in August 2023, shared not only the results of their investigation but also the journey that led them to construct a story where scientific journalism found an unexpected way to dialogue with one of the most painful realities of this border region: violence.
A Paradoxical Premise: Finding Ancient Life Amidst Modern Tragedy
For decades, the desert surrounding Ciudad Juárez and the Juárez Valley has been a scene of searches related to violence. Experts, criminologists, agents, and families have traversed vast expanses trying to locate human remains and evidence to explain a disappearance or a crime. But amidst these searches, other remains sometimes appear. They do not belong to recent victims, nor even to our era. They are fossils.
This paradox formed the core of the award-winning report, which received the State Journalism Award in the Reportage category. The project, born from a call by InquireFirst, a non-profit journalistic organization based in San Diego, California, dedicated to promoting science journalism in Latin America, in collaboration with Periodismo Sin Fronteras and funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, sought to tell a different story of a city often defined by its struggles.
Weaving Together Disciplines: Paleontology, Geology, and Human Stories
Juan Antonio Castillo, a connoisseur of the region’s history, guided attendees through images and slides, illustrating the episodes and scenarios that shaped their work. Aracely Lazcano spoke about the binational construction of the report and her contributions from El Paso, Texas, while Gustavo Cabullo delved into the human component of the story and the work carried out in the Juárez Valley.
The report featured the participation of specialists from the Autonomous University of Ciudad Juárez, the University of Texas at El Paso, and the National Autonomous University of Mexico, among other institutions and scientific sources. During the event, students were eager to understand the genesis of the idea, the time required for the investigation, how academic sources were located, and how three journalists managed to articulate paleontology, geology, history, migration, violence, and memory into a single narrative.
Beyond the Headlines: A Deeper Understanding of Ciudad Juárez
This interaction transformed the presentation into more than just a talk about journalism. It became a conversation about the possibilities of narrating Ciudad Juárez from different perspectives. “Unearthing, the peaceful past of the most violent city in the world” was published in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, gaining national and international dissemination.
Perhaps the most significant outcome of that project reappeared three years later, this time within a university classroom: students asking questions. Because this narrative-audiovisual exercise was born precisely from that-from asking what else could be told about a city so often narrated through violence. The answer, they discovered, lay beneath their feet.
Among the stones, fossils, and scars of this territory remains a history written millions of years before us. Knowing it does not erase the violence or its victims, but it does allow us to understand that this border is much more than its most painful years. And that, too, is one of the tasks of journalism: to unearth stories that allow us to look anew at the place we think we know.
Source: https://comunica.uacj.mx/04-09-2026/105604
