E.L. Frederick
Intel Briefs for Worldbuilding
Fiction set in a real place owes that place accuracy before it earns the right to invent. These are the reference documents the Vampires of Tucson books are built on: open-source intelligence products on the real Arizona-Sonora border, assembled from federal statistics, inspector-general audits, court records, peer-reviewed research and government open data.
Every source carries a NATO/Admiralty grade, every analytic judgment carries an explicit confidence level, and every claim the evidence would not support is named as a gap rather than smoothed over. Where a figure could not be confirmed, the brief says so. Where an earlier version was wrong, the correction stays visible instead of being quietly absorbed.
These are not the fiction, and they are not policy arguments. They draw no line to any character, faction or location in the series. That step comes later and under open fictional licence, which is exactly why the factual layer is written down first: a story that departs from the record should depart from it on purpose. Nothing here is an authoritative intelligence product, and none of it should be relied on outside that purpose.
Briefs
6 entries · newest first-
Economic and Debt Slavery in Mexico and Central America, 2015-2025
An open-source intelligence reference on poverty and coercive debt in Mexico and Central America, graded on the NATO/Admiralty scale with confidence-labelled judgments, a Key Assumptions Check and an Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. The best-measured debt mechanism in the subject, Guatemalan highland migration lending secured on house and land deeds at five to twenty percent monthly, is not debt bondage under the 1956 Convention, because that instrument reaches a pledge of personal services and not of property. No UN body publishes a country-level forced labour estimate for any country here, and the ILO's own validation puts country-level imputation error at 94.3 percent. Mexican poverty fell fourteen points while the exposure that turns a bad month into a debt did not.
45 graded sources
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The Price of a Trafficked Person, 2000-2025
An open-source intelligence reference on the economics of human trafficking, graded on the NATO/Admiralty scale with confidence-labelled judgments, a Key Assumptions Check and an Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. There is no average market value of a human being, because there is no market: the phrase covers six different transactions that are not substitutable. On the input side the person overwhelmingly pays their own way in. On the output side, the only systematic price dataset any intergovernmental body has ever published found a median of 870 dollars across thirty court cases, and it has never been repeated. The single most-quoted profitability figure in the field turns out to rest on one researcher's dataset, and he was also a peer reviewer of the report that used it.
93 graded sources
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Psychological Markers in Trafficking Victims, 2000-2025
An open-source intelligence reference on the psychology of trafficking victims, graded on the NATO/Admiralty scale with confidence-labelled judgments, a Key Assumptions Check and an Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. A five-way multi-model verification pass produced thirty-four marked corrections, four of which reversed a finding: the brief's own central claim that trafficking leaves no distinct psychological signature was downgraded two confidence levels under checking, and every correction is shown in place rather than folded in silently.
41 graded sources
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Human Trafficking Victim Marking and Identification, 2015-2025
An open-source intelligence reference on how trafficking victims are marked and how they are found, graded on the NATO/Admiralty scale with confidence-labelled judgments, a Key Assumptions Check and an Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. The record splits the subject in two: a tattoo is strong evidence about a person already identified and near-worthless for picking one out of a crowd, and NIST measured both sides at 72.1 percent and 14.9 percent. Trafficker branding is real and prosecuted; its frequency has never been measured, the foundational paper disclaims the inference built on it, and the one state that tested the indicator against outcomes found it far too rare to screen on.
80 graded sources
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Origin Regions and Northbound Trafficking Routes, 2015-2025
An open-source intelligence reference on five trafficking origin regions and the corridor north into Cochise and Santa Cruz counties, graded on the NATO/Admiralty scale with confidence-labelled judgments, a Key Assumptions Check and an Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. The record pushed back on the premise in four places: the corridor carries Mexicans and Guatemalans and almost no one else, southern Arizona is a crossing point rather than a destination, the eastern Salvadoran highlands do not exist as a unit in any source, and no documented trafficking route connects any of the five origins to Arizona at all.
78 graded sources
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Border and Cartel Trafficking, 2014-2024
An open-source intelligence reference on the Arizona-Sonora corridor, graded on the NATO/Admiralty scale with confidence-labelled judgments, a Key Assumptions Check and an Analysis of Competing Hypotheses. Three findings cut against the received version of this territory: cartels mostly tax trafficking rather than run it, drugs move through the ports rather than between them, and the unaccompanied-minor pipeline fails in four separate places for four separate reasons.
69 graded sources
