Dispatch #50: Libyan oil, piñata making and teen migrants navigating displacement in Lithuania

Read about the underworld of Libyan oil, Mexican piñata makers, and the migrant teenagers navigating war and displacement in Lithuania

Hello and welcome to Translator’s weekly Dispatch, where we bring you summaries of compelling stories written beyond the Anglosphere.

This week, we turn our attention across the Mediterranean, where an Italian investigative report delves into the shadowy trade in Libyan oil, and asks how it connects both with power struggles at home and geopolitical entanglements abroad.

From Mexico, we look at the making of Christmas itself. Tracing the star-shaped piñatas used in posada festivities, this piece explores how craft, ritual, and seasonal labour sustain livelihoods while keeping a centuries-old communal tradition alive.

And from Lithuania, we go inside the Rukla centre for teenage migrants. Moving between war, displacement, and institutional uncertainty, this powerful essay asks how young people navigate adolescence under conditions of existential uncertainty.

P.S.: In the meantime, tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of different linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate in full for the magazine.

Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.

Black gold across the Mediterranean

An Italian report into the murky underworld of Libyan oil

The histories of Italy and Libya have long been intertwined: from the time when Libya was a province of the Roman Empire, to Italian colonial rule in the twentieth century, to leadership level politico-business dealings across the Mediterranean in the twenty-first.

Italy’s largest oil company, ENI, has long been the largest foreign operator in Libya. Former Libyan dictator Muammar Gadaffi, and Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister for much of the 2000s, signed a major friendship treaty in 2008 which led, amongst other things, to significant Libyan investment in Italian banks and other assets. (In 2011, Italy nonetheless provided support for the military campaign which resulted in Gadaffi’s ousting.)

In this piece for Italian investigative journalism outfit IrpiMedia, building on a regular subject in the publication’s reporting, Carlotta Indiano and Fabio Papetti relate the latest twist in a long trans-maritime tale.

It details the arrival of crude oil in the Italian port of Trieste in 2024, ostensibly produced in Libya by the relatively new company Arkenu; but prompting Indiano and Papetti to raise wider questions about smuggling, so-called “shadow fleets” of tankers in the Mediterranean, as well as who is behind Arkenu itself.

Arkenu, the article says, has sold $500 million of Libyan oil over the last two years, and is the first private company in Libya to have been permitted to do so. At the same time, the state National Oil Company (NOC) has been “infiltrated” by armed groups and their interests, the article states, citing a UN expert report from 2024 (the report is available here). In effect, NOC, and the Libyan Central Bank as the recipient of national oil export revenues, are being circumvented.

Who benefits? The article notes the hypothesis that Arkenu itself results from an “accordo triangolare” (a three-sided agreement) to the benefit of the UN-recognised Government of National Unity (which controls the west), the Libyan National Army and General Khalifa Haftar (in the east), and the United Arab Emirates. The 2024 UN expert report stated Saddam Haftar, the son of General Haftar, was in indirect control of Arkenu.

Meanwhile, the eastern Libyan coastal cities of Tobruk and Benghazi in the Haftar domain are said to have become hubs of oil smuggling. Libya produces crude oil, the article notes, but has limited refining capacity, and so needs to import refined products, such as petrol. The domestic price of petrol is subsidised by the Libyan Ministry of Finance. So there’s an incentive to re-export and re-sell these products, siphoning off that subsidy as profit.

But this is where the report gets really murky. Sometimes what is being re-exported may be actually Russian. Example: a ship turns up in Libya carrying Russian oil and transfers its cargo to another to hide its origin. Other times the transshipment could happen off the coast of Malta. (This is a subject IrpiMedia has reported on before).

The ships involved in smuggling from Libya often “spoof” – that is, use technology to hide their true location, a classic technique of so-called “shadow fleets” transporting sanctioned Iranian or Russian oil, and engaged in transshipment.

The EU tends to use the term “shadow fleet” exclusively in reference to Russian oil. But, as this article suggests, the overlapping web of interactions in the Mediterranean – both licit and illicit, legal and illegal – is more complex, with more players involved.

Ultimately, everyone is trying to achieve the same thing: turning a sticky black substance, wherever it’s from, into money and power.

This original source article ‘I misteri di Arkenu, la società petrolifera che unisce i potenti che si contendono la Libia’, was published in Italian by IrpiMedia on 10 December 2025.

It is available here.

IrpiMedia is an independent, non-profit investigative Italian media outlet.

Summary by CE

Where stars are made

How decorative star-shaped piñatas sustain livelihoods and ritual life in Mexico

In this reported piece for Contralínea, journalist Fernanda Monroy takes us into the family workshops and neighbourhood markets of Mexico City, where brightly coloured star-shaped piñata decorations are patiently made by hand, year after year, in the lead up to Christmas. Once finished, the piñatas will be used as adornment for traditional “posadas” – ritualised re-enactments of the story of Mary and Joseph looking for shelter before the birth of their child.

Monroy begins in La Magdalena Mixhuca, near the Jamaica market, where the Alcaraz Estrella family has turned three adjoining homes into a piñata workshop that spills onto the street each December. Here, unfinished bodies of piñatas stretch along the pavement, some towering over two metres tall, while newspapers, tissue paper, cardboard, and glue are stacked inside repurposed fridges and rooms. The work moves smoothly because, as Monroy observes, the knowledge now lives in the artisans’ hands.

Seventeen-year-old Luis Alberto Alcaraz represents the continuity of this knowledge. He has been making piñatas with his family since he was twelve, learning both the standard “posada” size – 60-70cm across – and more monumental custom-made stars that seem to defy gravity. His aunt, Vanesa Alcaraz Estrella, explains that around twenty family members are involved in the trade, which began generations ago not as a business, but as a way of making enough piñatas for a family celebration. Over time, that impulse to share turned into a livelihood.

Across markets like Xochimilco, Monroy meets other artisans, including Eduardo Romero and Teresa Rodríguez, whose families have sold star piñatas for decades. Their testimonies chart how the craft has adapted. Clay, once central to piñata making, have largely been replaced by paper and cardboard. The reasons are practical rather than nostalgic: clay is expensive, heavy, and dangerous when broken by children. Paper, by contrast, allows for safety, scale, and experimentation, without losing the symbolic core of the tradition.

Monroy lingers over the technical rituals that give each star its form. The paste must be mixed to the right viscosity. Newspaper is layered patiently, then left to dry under cooperative weather. Cardboard cones are measured and attached, sometimes seven, sometimes nine, depending on the artisan’s eye. Tissue paper is cut into long fringes and applied in dense, colourful layers, creating spirals, flowers, or shimmering metallic finishes. While decorating may take only hours, the preparation of materials stretches back months, with families collecting paper and cardboard throughout the year.

The scale of production varies. Some families make hundreds of piñatas; others make fewer, larger, bespoke pieces. But Monroy shows that volume is not the point. What matters is continuity. For these artisans, piñata making is a way of honouring ancestors, teaching children, and asserting the specificity of Mexican tradition. While the piñata’s origins may lie elsewhere, the star, they insist, belongs to Mexico.

This original source article ‘Piñatas de estrella: oficio detrás de la tradición de las posadas’ by Fernanda Monro was published in Spanish in Contralínea on 5 January, 2026.

It is available here.

Contralínea is a Mexican investigative news magazine and outlet known for in-depth reporting on politics, society, culture, and grassroots issues.

Summary by ZN

The ever-changing faces of teenagers in Rukla

How unaccompanied minor migrants navigate war, displacement, and uncertain futures in Lithuania

Journalists Austėja Pūraitė and Audra Skuodaitė report from Lithuania’s Rukla Reception Centre, tracing the fragile and unstable lives of unaccompanied minor migrants arriving at Europe’s eastern edge. Through close observation and intimate encounters, their piece for NARA, a Lithuanian news platform, shows Rukla not as a destination but as a pause. A holding space where childhood and uncertainty coexist.

The report opens inside the centre itself, during a music workshop run by an arts organisation. Teenagers from Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, and Afghanistan take turns rapping and improvising in multiple languages. The scene establishes a recurring theme. Even in transit, these young people are not only migrants or victims but teenagers, experimenting with voice, fashion, and selfhood.

One of them is Amin, a 17-year-old from Sudan, whose story anchors the article. Amin fled escalating civil war in western Sudan, leaving behind his mother and younger brother. He has not heard from them in months. After travelling through the UAE and Russia, he attempted to cross into the EU via Belarus and Latvia, where he says he was beaten by border guards despite showing his passport. Now in Rukla, he awaits an asylum decision that may take months.

Through Amin’s phone, the journalists show how distant wars remain present. Instagram videos of executions in al-Fashir blur into daily conversation. Amin speaks plainly about armed groups forcing people to choose sides, about hunger used as a weapon, about fear becoming normalised.

The reporting then widens beyond Amin. Since May 2025, there has been a sharp rise in unaccompanied minors arriving at Rukla, sometimes as many as 15 per day. Most come from Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Sudan. One of the several photos accompanying the report (also by Skuodaitė), shows a map of the world pinned with flags of the country of origin of Rukla’s current residents, stretching as far as Cuba, Vietnam and Bangladesh.

Many minors arrive at Rukla exhausted, injured, or malnourished after days in forests along the Belarusian border. NGOs have documented systematic violence at the EU’s eastern frontier: beatings, pushbacks, confiscated phones, and deaths that go unrecorded. One of the female workers at the centre, Kristina, says she is often referred to by the minors as “mother”.

Pūraitė and Skuodaitė repeatedly return to an atmosphere of transitoriness. Teenagers appear, speak – then vanish. Ahmed from Somalia plans to stay in Lithuania; he disappears the following week. The journalists speak to Yuusuf, 15, also from Somalia, who fled daily violence at home and corruption at the hands of police; the next time they are in touch with the centre, he’s gone. Abel, from Ethiopia’s Tigray region, arrives on crutches after breaking his leg while running through the forest. Later, he dances, laughs, posts TikToks, and quietly moves on, swapping Lithuanian flags for Polish ones on his social media.

Minors who arrive in Rukla having crossed the border illegally are free to leave the centre. (Unlike adults, who in a similar situation would be detained). Social workers regularly retrieve them from borders with Poland, joking that they provide “taxi services,” even as the underlying risk is clear. Across Europe, tens of thousands of migrant children have gone missing after arrival, making unaccompanied minors particularly vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation.

By the end, Rukla feels emptied again. Only a few minors remain, but the flow of arrivals may resume at any moment. The teenagers’ faces, styles, languages, and plans keep changing, even as the structures governing their movement remain rigid.

This original source article ‘Nuolat besikeičiantys paauglių veidai Rukloje by Austėja Pūraitė and Audra Skuodaitė’ was published in Lithuanian in NARA on 13 December, 2025.

It is available here.

NARA is a Lithuanian news platform focused on social issues, developing responsible journalism that examines fundamental societal processes, grounded in respect for people and in-depth research.

Summary by ZN

That’s all for now – we hope you’ve enjoyed the read. Keep an eye out for our next Dispatch of summaries this time next week!

The Translator team