Elena Vasquez-Torres

Elena Vasquez-Torres is the Editor-in-Chief of The Trade Signal at Zovora. She grew up in Bogotá watching her father run a small coffee export business. He was good at growing coffee and terrible at reading trade policy — a combination that cost the family everything when an import regulation changed overnight in their key market. She was fourteen. The experience left her with a permanent conviction that trade policy is too important to be written only for people who already understand it. She studied economics in Colombia before moving to Europe, where she spent a decade working at the intersection of trade policy and journalism. She covered trade negotiations, customs regimes, and the mechanics of how goods actually cross borders — the paperwork, the tariffs, the quiet policy changes that reroute entire supply chains while the businesses affected are the last to know. She started The Trade Signal because she believed trade journalism had a blind spot. Most coverage is written for policymakers and analysts. Almost none is written for the exporter in Gujarat trying to understand whether a new agreement changes the math on a European shipment, or the importer in Zurich wondering why a pharmaceutical intermediate costs 30% more this quarter. Her editorial standard is usefulness. Every story published under her name must answer the question: what does this mean for someone who actually trades? If a story reads like a policy brief, it gets rewritten. If it buries the number that matters in paragraph six, it gets restructured. If it uses jargon that an exporter wouldn't recognise, it goes back. She reads trade policy in English, Spanish, and French, and maintains that the most important skill in trade journalism is not knowing what happened, but explaining why it matters to the person whose business depends on it.