Tag Archives: Miriam Rodriguez

Exile Content & Lawrence Bender to Develop Paulina Villegas & Azam Ahmed’s ‘New York Times’ Article About Deadly Mexican Assassin into Project

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Paulina Villegas’ written words will be coming to life soon…

Exile Content has partnered with producer Lawrence Bender to acquire the rights to the Latina reporter and Azam Ahmed’s New York Times article, “He Was One of Mexico’s Deadliest Assassins. Then He Turned on His Cartel.”

Paulina Villegas x Azam Ahmed’s New York Times Article

Exile and Bender are currently developing the story into a film or series with Ahmed and Caitlin Roper as producers.

Ahmed and Villegas’ article was published in December 2019. It tells the story of a man who became one of the deadliest assassins in Mexico, who eventually taken into custody via a makeshift witness protection program. He eventually fell back into the deadly trade. “This will never end, no matter what I do,” he said in the  story. “But I just won’t be a part of it anymore.”

This isn’t the first story from Ahmed to be acquired for development.

In December, Blumhouse acquired the rights to Ahmed’s New York Times article “She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One” which chronicles the story of Miriam Rodríguez, a Mexican mother who tracked down the kidnappers who abducted and murdered her daughter.

Blumhouse Wins Screen Rights to New York Times’ Story About Late Mexican Human Rights Activist Miriam Rodriguez

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The late Miriam Rodriguez’s story is headed to the big screen…

Blumhouse has won the screen rights to a December 13 New York Times story which chronicled the late Mexican human rights activist and desperate mother’s revenge spree in Mexico, when she avenged her daughter’s murder by taking on the drug cartels and tracking down the perpetrators by herself.

Miriam Rodriguez

She saw 10 of them apprehended by police before she was shot and killed in front of her home on Mother’s Day, 2017.

NYT will produce with Blumhouse, and Caitlin Roper, NYT’s executive producer for scripted projects, is producing alongside the article’s writer, Azam Ahmed, and Jason Blum.

Anonymous Content represented the article in the sale process.

The story, titled She Stalked Her Daughter’s Killers Across Mexico, One by One, ignited a heated bidding immediately after it was published December 15.

Ahmed is NYT bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. His article tells the story of the 56-year-old Rodriguez, whose whole world came crashing down on her when she lost her daughter, despite paying multiple ransom demands after the 20-year-old was kidnapped in 2014.

Getting no help from law enforcement, Rodriguez took things into her own hands. Using disguises and different identities, she went after the alleged kidnappers. She even used a gun to hold the culprits until she could get them handcuffed and arrested. Her story is juxtaposed with the plight of another family desperate for a happier outcome after their son is kidnapped.

Ahmed reported a series on the homicide crisis in Latin America, the deadliest region in the world, outlining the root causes of the violence. Each piece delved into a specific issue in a specific country, using intimate portraits of those living on the front lines of the crisis: the inescapable cycles of violence in Honduras, the scourge of femicide in Guatemala, the pervasiveness of illegally smuggled U.S. guns in Jamaica, the making of a cartel assassin in Mexico and the violence of the state in Brazil.

Last month, Azam won the Michael Kelly Award for his courageous and moving work for this series.

Azam’s reporting for this series has also been recognized this year with a Polk award, an Overseas Press Club award and the James Foley Medill Medal, which recognizes courage in pursuit of a story. Ahmed’s investigative work on corruption and the illegal use of spyware, Pegasus, helped launch federal investigations in México and led to major arrests and reform and the project was submitted by The Times for a Pulitzer Prize. Azam was previously the NYT bureau chief in Afghanistan, where he worked for nearly three years covering the war.