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Reveal Presents

Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting

Reveal Presents is home to multi-part investigative series produced by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.

In season three, reporter Anayansi Diaz-Cortes investigates a mystery that has haunted Mexico for 8 years. In 2014, students from a rural college in Mexico came under attack by police. Six people were killed and 43 young men disappeared without a trace. Families suspected the government was hiding the truth. Now, Reveal is exposing corruption at the highest levels, and an unsettling connection to America’s war on drugs.

Reveal Presents is home to multi-part investigative series produced by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.

In season three, reporter Anayansi Diaz-Cortes investigates a mystery that has haunted Mexico for 8 years. In 2014, students from a rural college in Mexico came under attack by police. Six people were killed and 43 young men disappeared without a trace. Families suspected the government was hiding the truth. Now, Reveal is exposing corruption at the highest levels, and an unsettling connection to America’s war on drugs.

14hr 30min
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Reveal’s American Rehab exposes how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce.
October 5, 20201min 38sec
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Penny Rawlings is relieved to finally get her brother into rehab at a place called Cenikor. She doesn’t realize that getting him out of treatment is going to be the bigger problem.
November 14, 202021min 59sec
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Cenikor’s bizarre form of rehab has its roots in Synanon: a revolutionary rehab that started on a California beach in the 1950s. Synanon mesmerized the nation by claiming to have developed a cure for drug addiction.
November 14, 202054min 22sec
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After amassing a small fortune, Synanon’s megalomaniac leader turns the revolutionary rehab into a violent cult, with mass sterilization, a paramilitary group and a rattlesnake in a mailbox.
November 14, 20201hr
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He’s a liar, a killer and a wannabe country music singer. Luke Austin finds Synanon in prison and borrows from its philosophy to create Cenikor. But graft and violence nearly destroy it.
November 14, 202051min 6sec
Thumbnail for "American Rehab Chapter 5: Reagan with the Snap".
Cenikor rises from the ashes, thanks to the inventor of NFL football pads, the war on drugs and the endorsement of an American president.
November 14, 202033min 37sec
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Before sunrise, a line of passenger vans heads to job sites across Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cenikor didn't want to show us where they were sending rehab participants to work. So we followed the vans to find out.
November 14, 202023min 22sec
Thumbnail for "American Rehab Chapter 7: The Work Cure".
One man’s journey into Cenikor leads to almost two years of backbreaking labor. The program will change him. But can it help Chris Koon put his addiction behind him?
November 14, 202050min 1sec
Thumbnail for "American Rehab Chapter 8: Shadow Workforce".
For decades, work-based rehabs have spread across the country. The federal government doesn’t track them, and no one knows how many there are. So we counted them ourselves.
November 14, 202052min 56sec
Thumbnail for "Mississippi Goddam Chapter 1: The Promise".
Billey Joe Johnson Jr. was a high school football star headed for the big time.
February 1, 202250min 36sec
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On the morning of Billey Joe Johnson’s death, crime scene tape separates the Johnsons from their son’s body.
February 1, 202250min 35sec
Thumbnail for "Mississippi Goddam Chapter 3: The Autopsy".
Conflicting autopsy reports raise more questions about how Billey Joe Johnson died.
February 1, 202250min 41sec
Thumbnail for "Mississippi Goddam Chapter 4: The Investigator".
A Mississippi Bureau of Investigation detective wonders whether the case should be reopened.
February 1, 202250min 44sec
Thumbnail for "Mississippi Goddam Chapter 5: Star Crossed".
Billey Joe Johnson was a Black boy dating a White girl. That made the story behind his death even more complicated.
February 1, 202250min 24sec
Thumbnail for "Mississippi Goddam Chapter 6: Mississippi Justice".
Justice in George County has never been equal.
February 1, 202250min 24sec
Thumbnail for "Mississippi Goddam Chapter 7: Reasonable Doubt".
New revelations cast doubt on the idea that Billey Joe Johnson accidentally killed himself.
February 1, 202254min 2sec
Thumbnail for "After Ayotzinapa Chapter 1: The Missing 43".
From the beginning, families questioned the official story in the disappearance of 43 Mexican students. Now there’s a new search for the truth.
September 23, 202250min 33sec
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In Mexico, the investigation of the attack on students leaves key questions unanswered, but a DEA agent thousands of miles away thinks he knows why they were ambushed.
September 23, 202250min 28sec
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A mother prays that she will one day know the truth about what happened to her son.
September 23, 202250min 32sec
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Mexico’s investigation into the disappearance of 43 college students is making headlines, and also ruffling feathers.
September 23, 202212min 8sec

After Ayotzinapa Chapter 2: The Cover-Up

Thumbnail for "After Ayotzinapa Chapter 2: The Cover-Up".
September 23, 202250min 28sec

The second chapter of our three-part investigation into the abduction of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in 2014 digs into the government cover-up of the crime. 

Weeks after the disappearance, the Mexican government released its official story: Corrupt police had taken the students and handed them to members of a local gang. The gang had killed the students, then incinerated their bodies at a garbage dump. But parents of the students had their doubts. International experts begin to dismantle the government’s explanation of what happened to the young men.  

One question hanging over the families is why their sons were taken. Thousands of miles away from where the attack took place, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent thinks he knows why the students were targeted.  

The disappearance of the 43 students is part of a larger pattern of violence in Mexico, connected to the U.S. war on drugs. By the time the Ayotzinapa students were ambushed and taken, some 30,000 people had gone missing in Mexico, collateral damage in the war on drugs. Almost no one was prosecuted—instead, Mexican institutions were becoming a part of the corrupt narco system.