Borderland Beat

The Set Up In 2010, an American, school teacher, Rebecca James, moved with her daughter, Aurora, to Juarez, Mexico, as part of a teacher exchange program that allowed her to teach English at a high school in the city. Rebecca had an innate fascination with Mexico after a trip with her mother when she was in middle school. For the most part, Americans were immune to the vast violence going on inside the country as cartel leaders knew the killing of an American would only hinder business.

They simply didn't want the headache. As Rebecca settled in, she slowly realized that pockets of her neighborhood where the school was located was controlled by the Los Zetas Cartel.

Many times, throughout the school day, she would witness or hear from students about cartel operations that could put ordinary citizens in danger. At first, Rebecca merely wanted to help the families of her students, but what happened next changed journalism and the War on Drugs, inside Mexico and the United States.

The Digital Vigilante

In 2012, Rebecca registered a handle on Twitter under the pseudonym @OV

ordinary, Mexican, male citizen of Juarez named Oscar. She used Twitter f families and students about dangerous cartel activity. The Twitter handle

thousand followers, but her act of activism inspired other citizens to follow hostile regions of Mexico, citizen journalists started to keep track of cartel movement, and the murders that were taking place daily. This Twitter collective was turning into an Army, led by an anonymous Mexican male, who really was a blonde hair, blue-eyed American mother and teacher. Rebecca never expected what would happen next.

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Borderland Beat The Podcast Borderland Beat, the podcast, is a twelve-episode, scripted podcast narrated by Rebecca James, an American schoolteacher, who was undercover inside Mexico, running a vigilante blog.

The podcast will delve into the origin story of the blog and go inside the Mexican Cartel Wars and the border regions of the United States. Each episode will dive headlong into a story Borderland Beat is working on with the reporting from their undercover journalists.

Voiced by Hollywood Actors Produced by Don Sikorski and Jess Fuerst and directed by Brad Furman (Lincoln Lawyer, The Infiltrator, City of Lies).

The voices of the scripted podcast will be played by:

John Leguizamo

Taliso Soto

Benjamin Bratt

Ed James Almos Yul Vasquez Rosie Perez Elena Anya Mario Lopez Michael Pena