Reproductive tourism in Colombia, wind farms in Greece, and the hidden histories of South Korea's Chinatown
DISPATCH №57
Hello and welcome. Each week, Translator’s Dispatch brings you summaries of three compelling stories from media beyond the Anglosphere. It’s our way of helping us all read the world a little differently, to get out of our mono-lingual media bubbles. Feel free to share.
We begin in Colombia, where an investigation explores how surrogacy has become a booming industry.
From Greece, a report traces how Amazon-backed wind farm projects are encroaching on some of the country’s last untouched mountains.
And finally, in South Korea, a cultural critique explores the deeper histories of displacement and state control behind Incheon’s Chinatown.
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Mothers for hire
How Colombia has turned into a “paradise for reproductive tourism”
We are used to discussing surrogacy in fairly abstract terms. If the neoliberal idea of us being nothing but self-interested agents selling our skillsets, including our ability to bear children, in an all-encompassing marketplace sounds like an aberration to most of us; women’s sacrosanct right to self-determination – “my body, my choice” – might nonetheless be reason enough to support a practice that, at best, can be seen as an act of selfless altruism.
What happens, though, when these justifications, which largely assume a world of gender parity and freedom from want, encounter our own world of long-existing disparities and endemic economic violence?
In the article ‘Cuando seas grande no recordarás que naciste en un país extranjero’ [When You Grow Up You Won’t Remember You Were Born in a Foreign Country], Marina Sardiña at the Spanish non-profit and investigative journalism platform La Marea offers an in-depth, balanced look at the situation in Colombia and shows how economic inequality and a lack of opportunities especially for young mothers, coupled with a legal vacuum (partly justified by good intentions), can end up being an environment which allows for deception, exploitation, and abuse.
The piece starts by telling the story of Martha, a 30-year-old mother who has recently acted as a surrogate to a couple in France. As she explains, she was in economic dire straits, and now has to deal with the consequences of an emergency caesarean as well as having to let go of the child she bore. Through stories like hers, as well as those of women who found themselves former surrogates turned recruiters, so-called “referidoras” and even a former worker of one of the clinics – the author exposes the true workings of a system that acts through a veneer of altruism, but in effect preys on the most vulnerable and economically marginalised.
They explain how in theory prospective surrogate mothers have to fulfil certain conditions as a way to avoid exploitation. Indeed, some of them must be prepped by more expert ones to make it through the interviews.
As the narrative progresses, it becomes clear how most of these requirements – for example, the fact that they should be mothers to at least one other child – act as a mere cover for an arrangement that “utilises” them at every step of the process and keeps them captive both legally and economically. (Paulina – whose name was changed like those of all other women who appear in the piece – admits how she would often paper over candidates’ need for cash and come up with some other “socially acceptable” reason as part of her former role at the clinic.)
For their service, surrogates are paid in the region of 11,500 euros, which is a very considerable sum in a country where 43% of the population makes less than 310 euros per month, the purported minimum wage. As the author explains, this fee is broken down into instalments specifically designed to incentivise surrogates to see their pregnancy through and eventually give up the child. Likewise, by entering an agreement, they are subject to all sorts of obligations, including the ban on travelling and seeking an abortion, which severely limit their freedom and agency over their own body.
The very system of referidoras in which former surrogates groom new candidates in exchange for a finder’s fee seemsdesigned to sustain the fiction that these women came to surrogacy out of their volition, taking the clinics which advertise the practice off the hook.
These ads not only tend to couch surrogacy in the language of generosity, depicting it as a selfless act of philanthropy, but also severely downplay the health risks involved. The author relays the story – horrific in its matter-of-fact banality – of Elena. After experiencing a spontaneous miscarriage, she developed a myxoma [a benign tumour] as a result of the hormonal treatments. However, the clinic refused to pay for its removal. “When the baby is no longer with you, the attention toward you disappears … it is like you are no longer important.”
Not all women interviewed had a negative experience. The author, for instance, includes the testimony of Diana – a Venezuelan woman 37-weeks into her pregnancy who will use the money to go back and open a restaurant in her country. However, the general feeling you get from reading the piece is that by and large women who go on to act as surrogates do so mainly for financial reasons and often have little idea of what they are signing up for even if they have all gone through pregnancy before.
An important aspect that the author explores in the piece is the lack of legislation and unwillingness to broach the subject politically. It is this laissez faire attitude and lack of clear rules and guarantees that create the grey areas which then allow the exploitation to continue.
The original article written by Marina Sardiña in collaboration with Marco Dalla Stella, ‘Cuando seas grande no recordarás que naciste en un país extranjero’, was published in Spanish on October 13, 2025 in La Marea.
It is available here.
La Marea is an investigative journalism platform and a non-profit organisation run as a cooperative of journalists.
Summary by BS
Global giants are tearing up Greece’s remaining wild mountains
A $1 billion Amazon-backed wind farm is tearing through Northern Greece’s untouched Vermio mountains, part of a wider industry assault that could affect nearly a third of the country’s remaining wilderness
In Northern Greece lie the Vermio mountains. Herodotus once said this mountain range was impassible and according to tradition, paradise was to be held on the other side. Now, there’s a different story. A recent investigative piece from Reporters United shares how tech giant Amazon has breached Greece’s uncharted mountains. Only a few months ago, to climb the 2,062-meter Hamitis, the highest peak of Vermio in Western Macedonia, one had to hike for several hours through dense forests and pastures. Now, it looks more like a construction site.
“The magic of the summit, of the untrodden, has been lost. Now, companies have the right to just tear up our mountain,” says Giorgos Kasapidis, a member of SOS Vermio.
The culprit is a 59-turbine wind farm owned by the Cyprus-based Aer Soleir, a subsidiary of the Irish company Aer Solei, which is in turn owned by the American Quantum Capital Group. In November 2024, Amazon backed the project with a $1 billion investment to purchase the energy produced by the farm for fifteen years. The complex cuts directly through what Greek researchers call Roadless Areas (ΠΑΔ) – zones where the core lies at least one kilometre from the nearest road. These areas cover just 6% of Greece’s land surface and represent the country’s closest equivalent to true wilderness. Scientists say they should not be subject to any form of intervention.
Reporters United’s investigation, part of the pan-European Green to Grey project coordinated by Arena for Journalism and involving eleven media outlets, used satellite imagery to reveal how wind farms have destroyed 1,487 stremmata (roughly 150 hectares) of roadless land over the past three years, opening 60 kilometres of new roads into previously untouched terrain. Vermio has suffered most: 13 of the 59 turbines are sited within its two roadless zones.
Amazon is not alone. The investigation traces construction activity by some of the world’s largest energy corporations – including EDF, Iberdrola, EDP, DEI (Greece’s public power company), and Mitsubishi-backed European Energy – across unprotected wilderness sites stretching from Boeotia to the Peloponnese. If all planned projects go ahead, the article reports that the share of roadless mountain territory affected could rise from 3% to nearly 28% – roughly one in three of Greece’s untouched peaks.
Greece’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had promised at COP26 in 2021 that wind turbines would not be placed in the country’s roadless mountains and formally protected ten such areas. But hundreds of other roadless zones remain legally unprotected, leaving them vulnerable. The Deputy Minister of Energy told Reporters United that a spatial plan for renewables is still being drafted and declined to commit to including all roadless areas in exclusion zones. Amazon did not respond to the outlet’s questions.
Biology professor Vasiliki Kati, who led the mapping project at the University of Ioannina, warns that new roads into wilderness are among the gravest threats to biodiversity worldwide. Once a roadless area is fragmented, even neighbouring untouched land may lose its wilderness designation in future surveys – quietly erasing what took millennia to form.
The original article by Daphne Karavola, Eurydice Bersi and Ioanna Petsiou, ‘Η Amazon πατά τ’ απάτητα βουνά της Ελλάδας’ was published in Greek on 1 October, 2025 on Reporters United.
It is available here.
Reporters United is a non-profit investigative journalism network based in Athens, Greece, dedicated to producing independent, in-depth reporting and cross-border collaborations.
Summary by TMH
The truth behind Korea’s “voluntary ghetto”
Incheon’s Chinatown looks like a fun day out – but culture researcher Park Mi-Sook argues it’s one of the most revealing sites in Korea for understanding how the state has long displaced, suppressed, and then commercialised its Chinese community.
On any given weekend, Incheon’s Chinatown draws crowds. Tourists pose beneath red lanterns, read plaques about the origins of the globally beloved noodle dish jjajangmyeon and declare in front of dragon sculptures that the place “feels like China”. It is one of Korea’s most visited “exotic” destinations – familiar, photogenic, and apparently uncomplicated. Culture researcher Park Mi-Sook, writing for Slow News, wants to challenge this assumption.
Her piece takes as its entry point a term long attached to Incheon’s Chinatown: “voluntary ghetto.” The phrase is, as Park immediately notes, a contradiction. A ghetto implies coercion – historically, the forced concentration of a marginalised group into a bounded urban space. To call it voluntary is to dissolve that coercion into something more comfortable: community, choice, autonomy. Park uses this contradiction not to resolve it, but to pull it apart. The phrase, she argues, is doing ideological work – and understanding what that work is tells us something important not just about Chinatown, but about how Korean society constructs and consumes its relationship with the “other”.
The history Park traces is one of accumulated structural pressure, not free settlement. The original concentration of overseas Chinese in the area during the imperial-era concession period was not the product of communal desire but of imperial spatial logic – the Qing and Japanese empires carved Incheon into administrative zones designed to demarcate and monitor. After Korean liberation, anti-Chinese government policies and economic suppression pushed residents further from the city centre. Decades of decline followed: Chinese schools shuttered, commercial districts contracted, and a community found itself inhabiting a space that was, in Park’s words, “neither Korean nor Chinese” – caught between periphery and centre, belonging fully to neither.
Then, in the late 1990s, came reinvention. Incheon City designated Chinatown a cultural and tourism special zone, introducing Chinese-style sculptures, red colour schemes, and Chinese character signage. The problem, Park argues, was not the renovation itself but what it prioritised: the China tourists wanted to see – mythology and stereotypes over the lives of the people actually living there. Residents became, in effect, backdrop. Their histories, their precarity, their community networks were subordinated to an exportable image. The result is what Park calls “a China without the Chinese”: exotic enough to attract visitors, controlled enough not to unsettle them.
This dynamic has only intensified with the rise of platform capitalism. Today, Chinatown’s character is increasingly shaped not by city planners but by food delivery apps, Naver Maps ratings, and Instagram algorithms. Certain restaurants and streets are amplified by recommendation systems; others quietly disappear. Speculative capital follows tourist traffic, driving up rents and displacing longer-term residents. The district is being reorganised, Park writes, around “Instagram hotspots” rather than community – transforming what she calls a “city of memory” into a “city of images.”
What is lost in this transformation is substantial. In Park’s own words, “All of this has transformed Chinatown from a “place to live” to a “place to show.” What gets erased are the histories of hardship – the communities whose lives were shattered by post-liberation anti-Chinese policy, the immigrants navigating precarious labour and housing conditions today, the everyday texture of a life lived between cultures. Urban regeneration projects across Seoul follow similar patterns, from Euljiro to Seongsu to Gyeongridan-gil: certain memories are displayed, others quietly buried.
Park is clear that this is not merely a problem of misrepresentation. The myth of the voluntary ghetto has active political consequences. It transfers responsibility for spatial exclusion from the state onto residents themselves, turning discrimination into “community preference.” It justifies continued neglect by suggesting that people have chosen their conditions. It renders invisible the structural forces – imperial legacy, nationalist policy, tourism capital, algorithmic reorganisation – that have in fact shaped this space across more than a century.
To truly understand Chinatown, Park suggests, one must ask whose imagination is being served, whose choices are genuinely free, and whose memories have been selected for display. The place most Koreans associate with a bowl of jjajangmyeon is, she concludes, one of the most revealing sites in the country for examining how Korea has constructed – and continues to construct – its relationship with migration, otherness, and the past.
Publication Details:
The original article by Park Mi-Sook ‘인천 차이나타운, ‘자발적 게토’라는 신화’ was published in Korean on 24 November 2025 on Slow News.
It is available here.
Slow News is a South Korean digital media publication that focuses on “slow journalism,” providing in-depth analysis, commentary, and long-form articles rather than breaking news.
Summary by TMH
Don’t miss out. Get your copy of Translator Issue #2
Inside, you’ll find investigative and deeply human stories from Brazil, Tunisia, Japan, Belgium, Sweden and beyond. Discover Muhammad al-Zaqzouq’s profound essay on fatherhood under siege in Gaza, Tunisia’s environmental activists fighting back against industrial pollution, and how three young Dutchmen cornered the nitrous oxide market.
Plus: Ishan Tankha’s striking photo essay on Nepal’s Gen Z revolt, Fairuza Hanun reviews Khairani Barokka’s Annah, Infinite, and our first print edition of Read Between the Lines, where Jessie Lau unpacks media narratives around China’s ‘Mask Park incident’.