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Carlos Villalon

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Carlos Villalon is a photojournalist based mostly in Colombia, South America since 2000. He spent ten years in New York, USA, where he still lives, studying photography and doing independent work. His schooling has taken him to Haiti, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has since being working as a free-lance photojournalist.

On July, 2004, he published a story for National Geographic Magazine about Colombian farmers who live out of cultivating coca plants. He also worked extensively for The New York Times, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek magazine and other publications around the world. In 2006 he traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo were he spent two months covering the conflict caused by foreign countries extracting the nation's mineral riches at the cheapest possible prices. The result has been death and misery everywhere in the country.

Carlos Villalon is also involved in a story about The Darien Gap, the infamous border between Colombia and Panama. The Darien Gap, where The Pan American highway that stretches from Tierra del Fuego, in Argentina, to Alaska, in North America, is cut off by the inaccessible jungle, swamps, armed groups and drug dealers. Several travelers have disappeared on those jungles and many have been kidnapped there. Carlos expects to finish this essay in 2007 and then hopes to move into more ecological work in Chile, his country of birth.