Best reporting in any medium on Latin America
Award Year: 2024
Award Name: The Robert Spiers Benjamin Award 2024
Recipient: Staff
Affiliation: The Washington Post
Honored Work: “The Takeover”
This nine-part series takes readers across Latin America to show how criminal gangs have seized control of growing swaths of societies, undermined democratic rule and fomented violence in every corner of the region. Post reporters used vividly drawn characters to illustrate a changing landscape of drug and human trafficking, extortion and environmental crime. We meet a trafficker who used his illicit millions to hide in plain sight as a mediocre soccer player on second-rate teams, Indigenous Brazilians whose Amazon village life has been upturned by murderous gangs and the beleaguered Mexican tortilla makers extorted by the cartels. We learn how traffickers have converted the Galápagos Islands into a “gas station” for boats moving drugs north. And we travel down an inland river system to observe an elaborate network that moves drugs south through Paraguay and Argentina to Atlantic ports and on to expanding markets in Europe.
Links to the winning work:
How drug traffickers made the Galápagos Islands their gas station
A narco revolt takes a once-peaceful nation to the brink
How Mexico’s cartels infiltrated the tortilla business
A double life: The cocaine kingpin who hid as a professional soccer player
As a trafficker pursued dreams of soccer glory, investigators closed in
As smuggling rings made billions from migrants, the U.S. was sidelined
South America’s most dangerous gang invades the Amazon forest
A global boom in cocaine trafficking defies decades of anti-drug efforts
A South American waterway become a cocaine superhighway – to Europe
Citation for Excellence:
David Culver and CNN Staff
CNN Worldwide
“Gang-Fueled Unrest in Haiti”