Every Body Counts

In this investigative narrative, Rome-based American reporter Barbie Latza Nadeau unravels the dirty money driving migration and human trafficking. Taking advantage of desperate people’s tragic destiny has created a global market worth billions of dollars.

There are more than 280 million people on the move around the world at any given moment, according to the International Organization of Migration. Each person – every body – offers potential for the corrupt. From sex trafficking to drug mules, and child laborers in the fashion industry, desperate people generate billions of dollars. Every body has a value, and each death is a loss that conjures mild compassion from the general public, but which rattles the multi-billion dollar chain of human exploitation. A chain of unmeasurable length that has infiltrated the criminal underworld reaching up to the highest echelons of respectable institutions, from the Italian mafia to the cartels, from banks to governments.

No other multi-billion dollar translational enterprise is less understood than the money trail behind trafficking of humans and their organs. People stop looking when they see desperate people in boats or trudging through the jungle, but every single person represents potential for profit, and every body counts for those in the business of exploiting despair. Every Body Counts tells the stories of those who navigate a world where lives don’t matter, but where every body counts.

Rights sold:
France (Grasset Edition)
Germany (Hanser Blau)
Netherlands (Balans)
Spain (Seix Barral)
UK (Bonnier Books)