A victory against church secrecy in Colombia, Putin’s new law on "sovereign genetics" and where Fujian meets Wales
DISPATCH №64
Hello and welcome. Each week, Translator’s Dispatch brings you summaries of three compelling articles from media beyond the Anglosphere. It’s our way of helping us all read the world a little differently.
This week, we begin in Russia, with coverage of a disturbing new law on genetic material, and what it says about Putin’s paranoia.
From Colombia, we follow a long-running series of articles about clerical sexual abuse by a leading local media outlet, and the legal victory which means that what was once private, must now be made public.
And from a Chinese language publication, we bring you the fascinating story of how a Fujianese store manager in south Wales has become an internet sensation, and what it says about creating a sense of belonging in a new country.
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What’s behind Putin’s new law on “sovereign genetics”?
A Russian-language outlet investigates the sinister motivations behind – and consequences of – the Kremlin’s new law on genetic material
Vladimir Putin has long had an intense - some would say irrational - focus on the study and applications of genetics.
For years, the Russian president has been warning about the potential for biological weapons that would be able to target particular ethnic groups by attacking genetic particularities. While even state-supported scientists privately dismiss the suggestions as “Neanderthal nonsense”, Putin continues to claim that foreign adversaries are “collecting [Russians’] biological material, purposefully and professionally,” to develop such tools.
This paranoia is one of the motivations for the Kremlin’s new law on genetics, according to a fascinating – and disturbing – recent piece reported by Valery Panyushkin of the investigative project Sistema, published on the website of Radio Svoboda (Radio Liberty).
Putin signed off on the law in February of this year, Panyushkin reports. On paper, the legislative change is dry and technical: a framework for handling biological material and building a National Genetic Information Database, set to launch this autumn. In practice, it’s something else entirely, and potentially much darker.
The idea of a national genetics programme isn’t new. Since 2018, Russia has been investing in genetic technologies, with ambitions that echo those of Western nations: better diagnostics, new drugs, a foothold in cutting-edge science. But, as Russia becomes increasingly isolated in other spheres, the new law signals a shift away from that outward-facing model.
Experts interviewed by Sistema – all of whom speak anonymously – said the law is really about who controls this information and to what end.
First, the national database sits close to power: Vladimir Putin’s daughter, Maria Vorontsova, is part of its leadership.
Second, its most immediate use is military. A centralised genetic database would make it far quicker and easier to identify the dead and wounded – a practical problem in wartime that currently requires relatives’ DNA and time-consuming analysis. With a unified system, that could be reduced to minutes.
Third, there’s the question of surveillance. At the moment, individual laboratories aren’t required to hand over client data. If and when they are, the state would gain access to an entirely new layer of information about its citizens.
Finally, the law blocks cooperation with foreign healthcare systems (in part because of Putin’s paranoia about Russian material being misused). That cuts Russian medicine off from the global networks through which new treatments are developed and tested.
Sealing off this data has other, less obvious, consequences. Ukrainian investigators have collected genetic material tied to suspected perpetrators of sexualised violence in the country and elsewhere. Without access to Russian databases, matching that evidence becomes far harder: effectively shielding suspects from identification.
Taken as a whole, this law embodies an approach that Sistema describes in its headline as “sovereign genetics”. Centralised, cut off from the international community, and closely tied to the security state.
The original article (‘Суверенная генетика. Российская биологическая наука амбициозно отмежевалась от мировой’) by Valery Panyushkin was first published in Russian by Sistema on 26 March 2026.
It is available here.
Sistema is a Russian-language investigative project that has been run by Radio Liberty / Radio Free Europe and Nastoyashee Vremya (Current Time) since 2023.
Summary by TM
From silence, into the light
Over the last year and a half, the Colombian media outlet Casa Macondo has run a series of articles on accusations of sexual abuse in the Catholic church – and the ways in which it has been covered up – under the collective title “El Archivo Secreto” (the secret archive – in reference to the private curial archives of each diocese of the Catholic church, as well as the Vatican’s own secret archive).
Some of the articles in the series connect to international, cross-border investigations, conducted alongside El País from Spain, The Boston Globe in the United States, Observador in Portugal and Correctiv in Germany. (One article, from March 19 this year, goes into the details of Joseph Ratzinger, describing him as the “encubridor” – that is, the “abettor” to sexual abuse – who became Pope as Benedict XVI). As one might expect, the fight to reveal the extent of abuse across any global institution, particularly one as complex as the Catholic church, has many fronts; Colombia is just one.
Most of Casa Macondo’s articles are penned by Juan Pablo Barrientos, the head of the publication’s investigations unit.
Overall, they paint a disturbing – and disturbingly familiar – picture of what happened in Colombia: of priests moved around once accused of paedophilia, of protection from higher-ups, of stonewalling by church authorities when faced with requests for information, and even of priests being whitewashed in church-led outreach efforts intended to improve its image.
One of the earliest articles in the series, from November 2024, refers to a forum organised by the Jesuit order at the Javierian university (a church institution in the Colombian capital Bogotá) that year, where – the article says – questions from survivors about paedophile priest Darío Chavarriaga were “censored”. Another panellist at the same forum, Monsignor Francisco Antonio Niño Súa, advertising at length the measures taken by the Catholic church to prevent sexual abuse had, the article states, been himself responsible for protecting thirty-eight priests in a scandal the Colombian city of Villavicencio some years before, going so far as dismissing two female investigators in the case when they refused to toe the line of the church hierarchy.
Another much more recent article, published only this March, details the case of Father Mario Hernando Reyes Zambrano, an Ecuadorian-born priest who worked in both Colombia and Bolivia, in schools. There had been rumours and complaints for some years, Casa Macondo reports, but the way they were dealt with (or not) revlealed a pattern repeated with “mechanical precision”: a complaint, a temporary suspension (if that), transfer and re-instatement. Zambrano was eventually arrested on the basis of predatory sexual WhatsApp audio messages sent to a student at risk of failing his school year. Zambrano was rector of a school in Duitama at the time. (The article notes that Zambrano did not accept the charges).
A third article – and the most moving in the series (by Tatiana Escárraga this time) – is written in the first person, detailing the story of a man, now a surgeon, recalling his experiences as an altar boy to the parish priests who he once looked upon as father figures. His disturbing account details the arrival of a new priest who lured boys to stay behind by putting fish in the church fountain – which he asked them to look after – and then abused them in a nearby (deliberately secluded) private room. It also details the way in which another trusted priest, confronted with this account, became an abuser in turn. The victim – who at this point still aspired to become a priest himself – was in a situation of psychological torment and confusion. As he puts it in the article, “I lived trapped, condemned” in a hall of mirrors, caught between “guilt, manipulation, promises of help, vulnerability, an authority figure, and a commitment to absolute obedience”. At one point, the victim is told: “Don’t tell anyone, so as to avoid a scandal for the church”. The article is a study in psychological manipulation – Spanish readers should read it in full. It is available here.
At the core of the series is the intention to give voice to victims of clerical abuse (as above) and unmask those priests who have benefited from their positions of power (and those of the clerical hierarchy) to escape identification or punishment – but also a long running legal battle to ensure that the once secret archives of the church are made public, for good.
That battle, as Casa Macondo’s most recent article in the series shows, is achieving considerable success, a milestone in Colombian journalism. In 2023, Barrientos and another journalist (Miguel Ángel Estupiñán Medina) sent requests to 137 dioceses in Colombia, asking for whatever information they had on allegations it had received about priestly misconduct and what had been passed on (as required by law) to the public prosecutor. Only 17 dioceses replied, leading Casa Macondo to launch legal action against the others, based on earlier rulings of the Supreme Court. In May 2025, Casa Macondo achieved a legal victory in front of the full bench of the court, leading to a so-called “unification ruling” last month – in effect, pulling the various separate cases together into one.
It’s a remarkable achievement, and a reminder of the public importance of journalism. As the article notes, it makes Colombia “one of the few countries where the court has formally forced the world’s most powerful church to open up the records it has kept under lock and key for centuries”. The extensiveness of the final ruling means that it covers not only fifty dioceses, but also a range of church orders across the country and, in a new development, mandates information be provided to journalists – even of priests where there is no accusation of wrong-doing – in order to allow for patterns to be established which might suggest an institutional cover-up.
To date, Casa Macondo has received 13 per cent of the data originally requested, and yet has been able to build a database of some 800 priests accused of sexual abuse. If the proportions hold for the remaining 87 per cent of data as yet withheld, then the names of as many as 4,000 priests may ultimately be revealed. Once the information is there, Casa Macondo promises to publish a “complete X-ray of clerical abuse in Colombia, built with the same archives that the bishops have protected for decades.”
The private and secret will be made public. Into the darkness, light.
This summary draws in several articles from an extensive series by Casa Macondo. The specific articles referred to in the summary are linked above, and also listed below.
‘Los jesuitas encubrieron a siete sacerdotes denunciados por abusos sexuales’, by Juan Pablo Barrientos, November 3, 2024. Available here.
‘“No le digas a nadie para evitarle un escándalo a la Iglesia”’, by Tatiana Escárraga, June 14, 2025. Available here.
‘Joseph Ratzinger protegió a curas pederastas: la doble vida del encubridor al que nombraron Papa’, by Juan Pablo Barrientos, March 19, 2026. Available here.
‘“Quisiera estar a tu lado, ir tocando todo tu cuerpo”: los audios que hundieron al sacerdote salesiano Mario Reyes’, by Juan Pablo Barrientos, March 26, 2026. Available here.
‘La Corte Constitucional ordena a la Iglesia católica abrir sus archivos secretos de sacerdotes denunciados por abuso sexual’, by Juan Pablo Barrientos, April 17, 2026. Available her e.
Casa Macondo is a Colombian media outlet combining investigative, environmental, and cultural journalism with a strong social justice angle. It’s tagline is “Somos historias” – “We are stories”.
Summary by CEM
The multiverse of “UK Shelby”
How a Chinese immigrant in a Welsh town has built a following on Chinese social media platform Douyin and what his fame says about language and belonging
We’re standing at a general store in Port Talbot, a working-class industrial town in south Wales. Chen Qinghan, a journalist for the Chinese-language media outlet Initium Media, takes us inside. Beyond the price tags of the vapes, sweets, fizzy drinks and crisps on sale, there’s an unusual special offer available. Help the owner of the shop film a short video, the article reports, and the drinks are free.
The owner in question is Fei, a 40-year-old man from Changle, near the city of Fuzhou in southern China, capital of the province of Fujian. For the last decade or so Wei has been running The Aperitif, an unremarkable local shop in Port Talbot which has been selling the basic necessities of life (and alcohol) for the last fifty years. [Photos in the original article give a sense of the vibe]. Nothing special, you might think. But his Douyin account, known as “UK Shelby” – presumably after one of the characters from British television hit Peaky Blinders – has 900,000 followers. The secret to its success is it deceptively simple content: Fei teaches the town’s Welsh residents to speak Fujianese dialect and Mandarin on camera, in exchange for snacks.
Wei’s videos tend to feature a rotating cast of local teenage boys, most prominently a stocky, red-cheeked boy Fei has named “Seven Catties Six.” In China’s internet culture, the term “foreign teenagers” carries mildly menacing overtones: restless and rabble-rousing. Yet this particular Fujianese uncle, who can barely speak standard Mandarin himself, has somehow managed to round up a group of these potential troublemakers to stand obediently in front of a camera shouting Fujianese dialect words, a source of considerable online astonishment in China. On Douyin, the hashtag #teenagertamer generated millions of views. Fei became, briefly, a celebrity.
But journalist Chen Qinghan, who visited Port Talbot in November 2024 and spent three hours at the till watching the town pass through, is interested in a somewhat different story. His article is less about online virality than about what precedes and underlies it: eleven years of daily interactions, of letting shoplifting teenagers pick one free item from the shelves and telling them to ask next time, of covering energy drinks for boys without pocket money, of driving teenagers home in his cobalt-blue van. “Only when they genuinely respect you as a person,” Fei says, “will they be willing to film videos with you.”
The locals in the videos are largely unaware of their online afterlives. Among the recurring cast is Michelle, the mother who shouts “Nǐ hǎo” before Fei has finished introducing her, and nine-year-old Caden, whose shouts words in Fujianese. The videos are uploaded to Chinese social media platforms. Most locals only find out how many likes they got the next time they stop in. In Fujianese dialect, phrases like “Hǔ jiū” for “Fuzhou”, or “Yā bà yā yìng” for “excellent”, function less as cultural transmission than as a private language between people who have simply known each other for a long time.
The article’s secondary and more subtle subject is the audience on the other side of the screen. At nine each evening, with one hour left until closing, Fei sets up a second phone and starts a livestream on a smaller account: “Late-Night Souls, Fujianese Dialect.” Nine in the evening in Wales is five in the morning in China, but there are nonetheless around seventy viewers there. They are mostly Fujianese men scattered across the world: running supermarkets in Florida, riding delivery bikes through Changle county at night, sitting inside shops in Argentina. They send online gifts, argue good-naturedly in dialect, and leave their microphones open so the others can hear their background sounds: truck engines, street noise, the soundscape of being somewhere far from home, late at night.
Anthropologist Song Ping, who researches overseas Fujianese migration, describes this as the operation of “little traditions”: the informal, unsystematic knowledge that grassroots communities build to navigate unfamiliar worlds. What Fei has built is something like that: a loose order held together by nicknames (the Dean, the Director, the Director-General), dialect, and the accumulated credibility of years of turning up.
The piece ends on a detail that really earns its place. Fei’s most recent filming idea is to ask a local elderly woman in Port Talbot to recite a phrase from the Chinese internet: “At sunset the mountains return to the sea; the sea holds its depths. No one is without regret – only some do not cry out in pain.” He writes out the characters, notes the pronunciation, and explains the meaning.
The journalist Chen questions him why he’s chosen to do this. After a brief pause, he offers: the contrast is the point – an old lady saying something so literary. She doesn’t press him further. She doesn’t need to.
The original article ‘「英區謝爾比」的多重宇宙：福州方言，威爾士teenager和抖音直播間裏的深夜靈魂’ by Chen Qinghan was published in Traditional Chinese by Initium Media on August 27, 2025.
It is available here.
Initium Media (端傳媒) is an independent Chinese-language digital media outlet founded in 2015, specialising in in-depth reporting and commentary on politics, society, and culture across the Chinese-speaking world.
Summary by TMH
Translator Issue #3 is available now!
Inside, you’ll find stories from across the world: a Korean middle school on the political frontline, the world of gaming in 1980s Hungary, the fragile ecology (and mystery) of eels in northern Italy, the culture of shamans on the border of China and Vietnam, a searing investigation into Romania’s aesthetic gynaecology industry and Translator’s original Street Talks give voice to hyperlocal stories from Tehran, Karachi, Kyoto, Gaza and Bangalore – all illustrated by artists from around the world.
Plus: Abdul Bacet’s photo essay on Babur’s Gardens in Kabul, an interview with Abeera Kamran and Zeerak Ahmed on digitising the Urdu script, a multilingual crossword, and reviews of Polly Barton’s debut novel and Alexander Voloshin’s migration memoir.
