Isabella Cota

Isabella Cota is a reporter and Latin America partnership coordinator for ICIJ.

A Mexican native, Isabella earned a masters degree in business and financial journalism from City University London. She reported for Radio Netherlands before joining Thomson Reuters in the United Kingdom and Central America, where she investigated drug-trafficking routes in Costa Rica. She then relocated to Mexico City to join Bloomberg News as a markets reporter, where for a year she conducted a deep-dive into the illegal, cross-border trade of electronic waste.

During her time as a freelance reporter, she worked with OpenDemocracy to track millions of dollars spent by U.S. right-wing religious groups in Latin America and went undercover to expose so-called pregnancy crisis centers falsely advertising themselves as abortion clinics. In a follow-up investigation published in El País, Isabella lead a team of reporters across the region to reveal how U.S.-funded conservative groups offer vulnerable pregnant women false promises of putting their children up for adoption to ensure they carry the pregnancy to term.

Isabella also spent years looking into previously unknown ties between Mexican government officials and executives at an obscure U.S. startup that was granted billions of dollars’ worth of natural gas contracts. For exposing this alleged corruption and conflicts of interest, she won a Fetisov Journalism Award and the Mexican government has opened legal cases against the former officials in both countries.

Before joining ICIJ, Isabella worked as economics correspondent at El País. During her time there, she wrote “Suerte o desastre: El azar como modelo económico de AMLO” (Luck or disaster: Chance as AMLO’s economic model), a book about the Mexican economy under president Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Isabella is based out of Mexico City.