Pulitzer Center Update

This Week: Modern Slavery In Italy

Image by By AJ Cespedes / Shutterstock.

Image by By AJ Cespedes / Shutterstock. 

Canned Tomatoes Picked by Slave Labor

Tobias Jones and Ayo Awokoya

With Italy serving as a gateway to Europe for hundreds of thousands of migrants, the country now has a surplus of largely undocumented agricultural laborers who have been exploited as virtual slaves by Italian organized crime networks. Reporting in a Pulitzer Center-supported story for The GuardianAyo Awokoya and Tobias Jones investigate the dangerous living conditions of migrant farm workers who have no means of escaping to a better life. “In the Italian south, the lives of foreign agricultural laborers are so cheap that many NGOs have described their conditions as a modern form of slavery,” they write.

Workers return from the mines for lunch along a pathway etched into a cliff, past a mountain of garbage, at the La Rinconada gold mine complex in Peru. Peru,2019. Image by James Whitlow Delano.

Workers return from the mines for lunch along a pathway etched into a cliff, past a mountain of garbage, at the La Rinconada gold mine complex in Peru. Image by James Whitlow Delano. Peru, 2019. 

Mining For Gold in The World's Highest Permanent Human Settlement

James Whitlow Delano and Kenneth Dickerman

La Rinconada, Peru, is the world’s highest permanent human settlement—and home to an exploding environmental crisis. In a stunning collection of Pulitzer Center-supported photographs featured in The Washington PostJames Whitlow Delano documents the dangerous overlap of climate change and pollution in his reporting on artisanal gold mining and a fast-melting glacier.

Agreement on the accession of the Republic of Crimea to the Russian Federation signed. Image courtesy of the Office of the President of Russia.

Agreement on the accession of the Republic of Crimea to the Russian Federation signed. Image courtesy of the Office of the President of Russia.

Crimea Reckons With Russian Annexation

Hannah Lucinda Smith

Many of Crimea’s ethnic Russians welcomed the region’s annexation by Russia in 2014, but five years later, a poor economy and a crackdown on political dissent have left some Crimeans dissatisfied. Writing in a Pulitzer Center-supported story for The AtlanticHannah Lucinda Smith interviewed Sergey Akimov, a Cossack activist who once supported the annexation, but now is one of its staunchest opponents. Putin “plays hockey while the forests are burning,” Akimov told Smith, “But people believe it. They can’t imagine what they would do without him.”