Marco Vernaschi was born in Turin, Italy, in 1973. He began his long-term project to document the major illegal activities behind terrorism with his project “West Africa’s New Achilles’ Heel”, on cocaine trafficking, with the overall goal of showing how unaware consumers in the West support international terrorism.

His work with the Pulitzer Center documents the effects of cocaine trafficking in West Africa, showing how criminal networks led by Hezbollah and Al Qaeda destroyed a whole country in just a few years.

During this coverage, Marco spent a considerable amount of time with an African organization of drug traffickers affiliated with Islamist terrorists, documenting their criminal activities, the assassination of the president of Guinea-Bissau and the devastating social effects on local people, including crack addiction and prostitution.

In 2007 Marco documented in Bolivia the early stages of President Evo Morales’ new policy on coca crops, showing how the indigenous people living in the region of Chapare are forced by the circumstances, and by increasing demand in Europe and the United States, to deal with cocaine trafficking and smuggling, under constant blackmail and threat by the counter-narcotics police. The resulting story, “Bolivia: Broken Promises”, documented the involvement of children in cocaine smuggling, will be the focus of Marco’s upcoming video documentary.

In 2006 Marco covered the tin war in Bolivia’s Altiplano documenting the fratricidal conflicts among miners and its aftermath. The result was his story “Condemned to Repeat” and the photo essay “The Bitter Taste of Salt,” on the daily struggle of the Quechua salt-miners living in the northwestern salt flats of Argentina who are exploited by the international salt industry.

In Madagascar he documented child prostitution among the forgotten Tanala people, their struggle against a devastating wave of AIDS and the environmental problems related to their primitive form of agriculture, resulting in the story “Tales of Hope.”

Marco worked on other stories in Indonesia, India, Nepal, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Belize. His work is published internationally by major magazines such as Newsweek, National Geographic, GEO and The Sunday Times Magazine. He’s currently working on his first book, The Legacy of Cocaine.

Marco received a grant from the Pulitzer Center in 2008-09, and was named among the 10 winners for the ODP Award for Human Values. He was awarded the FUJIFILM Prize for Photojournalism in 2006 and was named Young Photojournalist of the Year in 2004 by the Italian Photography Foundation. He has also received grants from the Nando Peretti Foundation, in 2004-05.