Javier Espinosa

Background

About Javier Espinosa

ASSIGNMENTS: First Gulf War (1990), Sri Lankan Civil War (1991), Angolan Civil War (1992), Yugoslav wars (Croatia and Bosnia, 1992-95), End of Apartheid in South Africa (1994), Rwandan Genocide, War between Ecuador and Peru, Colombia conflict, Algerian civil war, Sierra Leone civil war. In Latin America, he covered all significant events in the continent between 1995 and as the invasion of Haiti by the United States (1994), the brief conflict between Ecuador and Peru, and presidential elections in a dozen nations. In Africa, from to 2002 he wrote about conflicts in Sierra Leona, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Zimbabwe or Burundi, famines, or an Ebola epidemic, but also elections and cultural events. Until July 2014 he was the regional correspondent in the Middle East, where he covered the Second Palestinian Intifada, the Iraq war (2003-2010), the 2006 Lebanon war, and from 2011 onwards the so-called Arab Spring in Egypt, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, Libya, and Syria and the civil wars that took place after. He reported many times from inside Syria being one of the few journalists who was in the final days of the strategic battle for Bab Amr, in Homs. From August 2014 to October 2019, he was the Asia correspondent from El Mundo. He reported on many subjects in that continent like Nepal’s earthquake (2015), human trafficking in Thailand, Duterte's war on drugs in the Philippines, and Myanmar's Rohingya Refugee Crisis of 2017, traveling extensively through North Korea. Based in China, he wrote a wide variety of articles on social issues such as the legacy of the AIDS epidemic in Henan, the consequences of the chemical explosion in Tianjin, the life of the hundreds of thousands of people living in Beijing basements, problems of so-called “black children” (without Hukou), child abduction, “body fishing” in Chinese rivers, environmental pollution in regions like Shaanxi or Guangdong and communities of cancer patients. He also covered Hong Kong protests in 2014 and 2019. Since his return to Spain in 2019 he has been working as a roving correspondent. He went back to Syria and Iraq in 2019 and covered the ongoing humanitarian crisis generated by the refugees who keep arriving in Greece, the Bielorrusia revolt, the war in Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Covid19 pandemic in Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Since the beginning of 2022, he has been many times reporting on the Ukrainian war.