El Fisgón


Rafael Barajas Durán, better known by his pen name El Fisgón is a Mexican cartoonist and illustrator who received the 1999 National Journalism Prize of Mexico for Editorial Cartooning.
The son of a schoolteacher and a psychoanalyst, Barajas was born on 1 January 1956 in Mexico City and graduated from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in Architecture. At the age of 20 he decided to become a cartoonist and eventually sent collaborations to the Sunday supplement of Unomásuno, designed covers for Nexos magazine and received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study dissenting political cartoonists in Mexico who worked between 1872 and 1910.
According to himself, Barajas is also a committed leftist activist who has led campaigns to support the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas and regularly promote student involvement in politics. He has co-directed satirical magazines such as El Chahuistle and El Chamuco y los hijos del Averno and, since 1984, he contributes regularly to La Jornada, a left-leaning newspaper published in the Mexican capital.

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