Juan José Martínez D'Aubuisson

My name is Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson. I was born in San Salvador, El Salvador, in 1986. I am a sociocultural anthropologist and journalist. In 2010, I wrote my first nonfiction book, Ver, Oír y Callar. Un año con la Mara Salvatrucha 13 (pepitas, 2015). In 2018, I co-authored my second nonfiction book with my brother Óscar Martínez, El Niño de Hollywood (Debate, 2018; Anagrama, 2024). It tells the story of a gang-affiliated hitman and the gang he belonged to. Around the same time, I began work on my third nonfiction book, El que tenga miedo a morir que no nazca (Planeta, 2025), the result of nine years of research and extensive fieldwork in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. The book examines the factors that made the city the most homicidal place on Earth for several years, as well as its recent history of looting and corruption at the hands of the United Fruit Company. My books and articles have been translated into seven languages, and I have published in outlets such as The Washington Post, Le Monde, BBC, El Faro, Gatopardo, Insight Crime, among others. In 2020, I received the Best Foreign Book Award from the French bookstore Mollat and the newspaper Sud-Ouest. That same year, I won the Rodolfo Walsh Prize for crime reporting at the Gijón Festival, both for El Niño de Hollywood. In 2022, I won second place in the COLPIN investigative journalism awards for my reporting on gang-originated mafias in northern Central America. In 2023, I received second place at the global True Story Award for the same investigation. I was also a finalist for the Gabo Awards in 2022 and nominated again in 2024. My report on the largest massacre to ever occur in a women’s prison, Nosotras, las masacradas, published by Redacción Regional in 2023, won third place globally at the 2024 True Story Award. That same year, my investigation Moskitía, una selva que se ahoga en cocaína, about the destruction of Central America's largest rainforest by drug trafficking groups, received the Ortega y Gasset Award, presented in Barcelona by El País. Also in 2024, my reporting on the Haitian migrant crisis in the Dominican Republic, Fronteras Masacre, received an honorable mention from the Inter American Press Association (IAPA). I currently focus on the dynamics of violence and domination affecting the Haitian population, and I follow the migration route of Haitians across several countries in the Americas. My work Buscando a Mikelson won the 2025 Gabo Award in the text category.