Vasco Sousa Cotovio, producer at CNN and alumnus of the Undergraduate Program in Social and Cultural Communication Studies'10, was awarded an Emmy for "Maduro's Blood Gold" investigation.
Vasco was awarded in the "Outstanding Business, Consumer or Economic Report" category, at The News & Documentary Emmy Awards, that promotes excellence in broadcast journalism.
"The investigation started from an idea that I had after my first visit to Venezuela in January 2019. I shared it with Isa Soares, a Portuguese colleague from CNN, and shortly afterwards we gathered a team that, for several months, had been researching, establishing contacts and scheduling interviews. We finally went to Venezuela looking for the puzzle pieces we were missing and only then did we finally manage to film the story" explains Vasco Sousa Cotovio. "We invested about six months, and in the end we found a connection between the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, and some of his closest allies, with the groups of criminals who control the exploitation and trafficking in gold (and other precious minerals) in the south of the country. The exploration, not only environmental but also of the men and women who work in this region, is done in spite of the Venezuelan people, who end up not taking advantage of an ore that belongs to them." he adds.
Regarding the nomination and award, Vasco Sousa Cotovio says that "this is an incredible award that makes us doubly satisfied: firstly for the recognition of the time and effort that we dedicated to this work, but above all, because it allows us to call attention to this problem and the crisis that is currently going on in Venezuela. From a personal point of view, it is a culmination of about six years of working and learning from the incredible team that CNN has in London." ends.
