With a digital camera, Alfonso Silva-Santisteban has found that telling people’s stories can help heal society in a way medicine can’t.
When you read a published article on News Decoder, you’re only seeing part of the story. Who is writing it? What went into reporting the story? Why were they interested in this topic in the first place?
To answer some of those questions, we present “Correspondents in the Spotlight.” In a series of video conversations, we introduce you to the professional journalists behind News Decoder, go in-depth on their latest articles, discover their career paths and learn about their writing process — and how they overcome some of the same difficulties that young writers face.
In today’s Spotlight, we speak to physician and freelance journalist Alfonso Silva-Santisteban.
Some journalists start out writing for high school newspapers. Alfonso Silva-Santisteban came into it much later.
Silva-Santisteban started as public health physician and researcher in Lima, Peru. After 15 years of research experience in areas around LGBTQ+ minorities — especially transgender people — HIV and AIDS prevention and human rights, he joined the Dalla Lana School of Public Health Fellowship in Global Journalism, News Decoder’s partner program at the University of Toronto.
His interest in journalism and photojournalism was sewn a decade ago. “I had people around me that were starting to move in alternative media organized using social networks and a lot were photographers covering things that were not on traditional media,” he said. “And I started seeing the power of that.”
At first, he was unsure as to whether journalism was for him until a friend told him that the most important thing was to be where things are happening and to talk to people. “And it kind of allowed me to think, oh, maybe I can do this,” he said.
Silva-Santisteban bought himself an entry level DSLR camera, learnt the basics and started documenting the world around him. Professional courses were prohibitively expensive and clashed with his timetable so he used free, online resources to get to grips with the basics.
“There are a lot of resources on YouTube that teach you the technical aspect, and then the rest is doing it,” he said. “So, I started using my camera and taking it everywhere. Here [in Peru] it was a time where there were a lot of protests happening in different areas and that was kind of my field work.”
The camera as a passport
The camera allowed Silva-Santisteban to tell stories in a way that words couldn’t and acted as a passport to new experiences and new worlds. Recently, he covered a story about a film festival in Iquitos, a city in the Peruvian Amazon.
“A group of movie makers did a film festival there,” he said. “The main act was floating. People would go in canoes in an area that floats six months a year. It’s a community cinema working within the Indigenous population. So, I pitched the story.”
Silva-Santisteban said that though he pitched the story to a Spanish newspaper, “the journalistic side was the excuse so I had the possibility to talk to people, to take pictures, to be there and then write something.”
“I wanted to be a witness to what was going on, because I like these processes of community art or art for social issues,” he said.
Telling these stories is part of what attracted him to journalism and photojournalism. Both open up spaces for dialogue and create spaces for change. To Silva-Santisteban, journalism is “a tool that allows us to have faster conversations and engage more people than just an academic audience.”
Covering difficult topics
His research centers on human rights issues, public health at the individual, community and structural levels and movements for social change — as does his journalism, which was honed at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health Fellowship in Global Journalism.
“I went into a program from the University of Toronto, which is a journalism fellowship that works closely with News Decoder,” he said. “Basically, they give people that have an expertise in an area already journalistic tools and that allows you to start pitching and writing stories.”
Silva-Santisteban’s first story for News Decoder was on violence against transgender women in Peru. The article, written after a spate of murders, deals with the exclusion and discrimination against transgender women.
“It was about a specific moment where, because of organized crime dealings with sex work, people were killed,” he said. “Transgender women were killed. Brutally.”
Silva-Santisteban reported on this episode in order to highlight just how far discrimination can go and to stress the importance of municipal planning and strategy around social issues.
Lack of forethought and city planning led to a territorial dispute. The local municipality cracked down on and closed an area in which cisgender sex workers operated. They were moved to another part of town which led to a territorial dispute with a group of transgender women. A local sex work mafia moved in and threatened the transgender women working in the area. Two transgender sex workers were kidnapped, beaten and killed. Photos were taken and shared on social media.
Community action and change
The local community were horrified. Outraged, they decided to take action. “Two days later, they were at the police precinct demanding justice, demanding action,” he said. “It’s one of those issues that mobilized the community, that you can see the sympathy of people and saying ‘enough.’”
Silva-Santisteban wanted to document the fact that these horrendous things take place but that a community can come together and demand change — structural change.
“The legal framework is not protective and a lot of transgender women have issues to access education or different job options and sex work becomes a thing,” he said. “That’s already a problem.”
When this type of work happens in violent environments and several marginalized groups are moved to the same dangerous area, the complexity of the issue is multiplied. That, in Silva-Santisteban’s opinion, is something that the authorities need to take responsibility for and could have planned for and prevented.
“You can’t neglect a group of people like that, right?” he said. Systematic neglect, a lack of planning and a lack of accountability ultimately led to the brutal death of two transgender women.
Unexpected outcomes
This event didn’t happen in isolation. After years of rising political and social instability, over a million migrants crossed the border from Venezuela. The massive influx of people and lack of structural planning brought a huge amount of social issues. The government knew a crisis was coming, yet they did little to prepare.
That News Decoder story, “Trans rights becomes a life and death issue in Peru,” became the most-read story of 2023 on News Decoder’s website after it was picked up by lawyers fighting for the rights of LGBTQ+ victims of discrimination and abuse and shared widely online. Silva-Santisteban was contacted by U.S. lawyers who had read the article and asked him to be a witness in the case of a transgender woman living in New York who was seeking asylum. The case rested on the fact that if she were to return to Peru, she would not be safe.
“I participated in that and a couple of weeks ago she was granted asylum,” he said. “But that happened because of the article.”
Silva-Santisteban urges students and journalists to be as responsible as they can in their storytelling. He admits that it can be difficult to be neutral. Often, a writer may want certain changes to take place and reporting on an issue can have knock-on effects.
“That’s okay, because I do want things to change regarding transgender issues,” he said. “I’m not going to lie when reporting. I’m not going to be biased and ignore if things are more complex.” That said, objectivity plays an important role in how you deliver the facts, how you undertake research and in maintaining a degree of neutrality.
Good journalists undertake rigorous research, talk to people, listen and connect with communities that can be hard to reach. In the end, it’s the people facing the issue that are most important. “So you need to talk to the people involved,” he said.
Interesting stories focus on a topic that says something about a wider situation. “It could be happening in this specific city in Peru but somebody in Germany is going to read it and relate to that,” he said.
He urges young people to follow their instinct and interests. “Follow your curiosity and enjoy the process,” he said.
Watch the full interview here.
Cathal O’Luanaigh is News Decoder’s program and communications manager. Cathal is an educator, linguist and creative with a particular interest in international development, global citizenship and the arts. He has a background in Geography (BA), Commercial Music Production (Diploma) and Development and Emergency Practice (MA). Irish, raised in Brussels and now based in Madrid, he has lived and worked in Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK, Spain, Uganda and Vietnam.