Gold is the new cocaine

That is the title of the fellowship awarded to Nadja Drost (Stabile 2009) by the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Drost, who is currently based in Bogota, Colombia, will spend the next 12 months working on an investigation on the dark underside of the booming gold mining industry in Colombia. She joins five other reporters who were awarded the prestigious Patterson fellowships, which are given annually to “journalists engaged in rigorous, probing, spirited, independent and skeptical work that will benefit the public.”

Investigating an epidemic of kidney disease

It remains a mystery: thousands of workers in sugarcane plantations in Nicaragua are dying from kidney disease and no one knows why. In the fall of 2009, while enrolled in the Stabile program, Sasha Chavkin began following the trail of this lethal mystery. “Little noticed by the rest of the world, chronic kidney disease (CKD) is cutting a swath through one of the world’s poorest populations, along a stretch of Central America’s Pacific Coast that spans six countries and nearly 700 miles,” he wrote in a story published today by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and by several newspapers in the U.S. and Central America.

‘Finding Fernanda’ is launched

In the fall of 2008, Erin Siegal, then a student in the Stabile investigative reporting program, began reporting on Guatemalan adoptions as part of her master’s project. With a grant from the Stabile Center, she traveled to Guatemala during the winter break to follow the story of Fernanda, a baby who had been kidnapped from her mother and then put up for adoption in the U.S. While on the trail of the kidnapped baby, Siegal uncovered a cross-border scam involving the abduction and sale of Guatemalan children to unwitting adoptive parents in the United States.

Stabile students go global

Students from the Stabile Class of 2011 wrote the cover story for the latest edition of Caixin, China’s most respected investigative and financial magazine. The story, “African Safari: CIF’s Grab for Oil and Minerals in Africa,” uncovers how a mysterious Hong Kong company managed to wangle lucrative deals from pariah regimes in Africa. A different version of the story, “China-based corporate web behind troubled Africa resource deals,” was also published on November 9 by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

The students began reporting on the China International Fund (CIF) in the fall of 2010 as part of a class project to investigate China’s increasing involvement in natural resources in Africa. They worked on the investigation for the rest of the school year, uncovering a transnational network of 60 interlocking companies in Singapore, Hong Kong as well as the offshore financial havens of Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands. Over the summer, four students from the class completed the reporting on the project: Beth Morrissey, Laura Rena Murray, Himanshu Ojha and Patrick Martin-Menard.

Mexico’s ‘cerro negro’

Last winter, while still a student at the Stabile Center, Karla Zabludovsky traveled to Torreon, northern Mexico to revisit the victims of the massive lead poisoning caused by the country’s biggest copper smelter.

The epidemic of lead poisoning was first made public in 1998, when a local pediatrician discovered that many of his patients had levels of lead in their blood that far exceeded the level set by the U.S. government’s Center for Disease Control.