Pulitzer Center staff and photographers at the opening of the Center's FotoWeek DC Exhibit.

Published December 30, 2011

Jon Sawyer, For the Pulitzer Center

The collateral damage of Americans’ appetite for illegal drugs has long been evident in Mexico. The impact of drug trafficking on Mexico’s Central American neighbors has been less reported but is increasingly severe, as Pulitzer Center grantee Nick Miroff reports in a series of dispatches for The Washington Post, NPR and GlobalPost. Honduras’s homicide rate for 2010 made it the most violent nation on earth, Nick reports, and tiny Belize has become a key gateway for Mexican drug mafias looking to skirt beefed-up enforcement at home. Even idyllic Costa Rica, an icon of pura vida for millions of American tourists, has seen its homicide rate double in less than a decade.

Our collaboration with outlets such as The Washington Post, NPR and GlobalPost reflects our commitment to bring the work of journalists we fund to the broadest possible public—and to give them, and us, the benefit of working with accomplished news editors to maintain the highest quality in the work we produce. The 56 projects we funded during 2011 led to 348 news-media placements. Each of them drew on the editorial talents of our journalists, the Pulitzer Center staff, and our news-media partners. The list is impressive: 20 placements in The Washington Post, 43 in Foreign Policy, 30 in The Atlantic, eight in National Journal, eight each for NPR and PRI/The World, four in International Herald Tribune, and many, many more.

One of our most valued partners is PBS NewsHour, which has featured our work in 14 broadcast segments this year including two this week—Steve Sapienza’s second report on gold mining in Peru and Fred de Sam Lazaro’s report on the scientific battle to develop wheat strains resistant to the
UG-99 stem rust fungus that threatens 80 percent of world wheat production. We are not alone in calling NewsHour a national treasure, a television bastion for serious reporting on serious subjects. We wish our colleagues there and at all our news-media partners continued success in 2012.

Until next week,

Jon Sawyer
Executive Director