The Gabriel Garcia Marquez Awards for Excellence in Journalism are the most prestigious distinctions Latin American journalists can ever hope to receive. Costa Rica is truly blessed to have one of the highest levels of press freedom in the Americas, which makes the job of excellent journalists such as Giannina Segnini of national newspaper La Nacion a little easier. Ms. Segnini is not only the proud recipient of a 2013 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Award; she was also instrumental in the muckraking case that landed two former Presidents of Costa Rica behind bars.

In a recent interview given to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Ms. Segnini explained how her investigative journalism team uncovered a web of deceit spanning from Costa Rica and Panama out to France and Finland. Ms. Segnini’s sharp investigative reporting revealed bribery in the millions of dollars, manifest corruption, palm-greasing, high-level horse trading, and an overall bastardization of democratic rule.

Ms. Segnini explained to ICIJ that it took her investigative team about a year of digging to come up with incredible conclusions that at first seemed like conspiracy theories. Sometimes truth, however, is stranger than fiction, and this fine work of investigative journalism resulted in criminal charges filed against former Presidents Rafael Angel Calderon Fournier and Miguel Angel Rodriguez. This is something that the Costa Rica Star has previously discussed in Bunga-Bunga or Jail: The Ex-Con, Ex-Presidents of Costa Rica.

The muckraking conducted by Ms. Segnini’s team predates the WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden affairs, but the lessons learned from what she initially named the “Finnish Project” are both shocking and thoughtful. She further explains that:

The biggest criminals write laws that make their crimes legal. That’s what I call transparent corruption.

There are hidden and complex corruption networks where even leaders who publically campaign for transparency extract as much as they can from their administrations.

Not even in the most extreme conspiracy theory would we have imagined, before these investigations, how wide and how deeply entrenched and those corrupt networks were.

In the end, the disgraced former Presidents barely spent a night in jail, but government officials in Costa Rica realized that investigative journalists like Ms. Segnini and her team at La Nacion are watching and ready to get some good muckraking done for the benefit of the people.