2024-07-08 03:01:00
Last Friday the Gabo Foundation announced the winners of the 12th edition of the Gabo Award 2024one of the most important recognitions of journalism in Spanish and Portuguese. For the third consecutive year, the award ceremony was held in the city of Bogotathis time at the Jorge Eliécer Gaitán Theater under the motto “journalism lives.” At the opening, a fragment of the speech given by the writer and journalist was recalled Gabriel Garcia Marquez (founder of the institution) said when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982: “In the face of oppression, plundering and abandonment, our response is life.”
The event was hosted by Colombian news presenter María Lucía Fernández and singer-songwriter from Chocó known as Tostao. The mayor of the Colombian capital, Carlos Fernando Galán, participated in the evening, and tribute was also paid to José Rubén Zamora, a journalist unjustly imprisoned in Guatemala since July 2022 who in May received the Recognition for Journalistic Excellence. “We could say that without journalism we are a stupid, blind, deaf-mute, totally stubborn society,” the musician proclaimed. “It is the storytellers who allow us to see, hear and get to know the other, break the barriers of polarization and be aware of the reality we inhabit.”
From a total of 2,170 entries, the best Ibero-American journalistic productions were recognized in five categories: Text, Image, Audio, Photography and Coverage. For the first time in the history of the Prize, the same work won the award in two different categories.The Night of the Horses: South America’s largest equine rescue“, chronicle written by the Argentine Diego Fernandez Romeral (journalist from Page 12) and published in the magazine brown cat won in Text and also in Photographyfor the production of the photojournalist Anita Pouchard Serra.
In a very crude text that at times resembles a horror story, Fernández Romeral maps horse meat exports, sheds light on a multimillion-dollar business in a country that prohibits the breeding of horses for slaughter and reveals a network of crimes involving cattle rustling, murder, state corruption and money launderingBut the text not only exposes this criminal plot but also focuses on the work of the NGOs that rescued hundreds of horses from the Campo del Horror for their rehabilitation. “When we write the notes we are never alone, there are always many people around us who love us, help us and encourage us to do all this”Fernández Romeral said in her speech, and thanked her family, the members of the NGOs who told this story and the editor Leila Guerriero, who announced the winner in the Photography category. Pouchard Serra, for her part, dedicated the award to “Argentine journalism, which is not going through an easy moment in its history” and shared it with “Argentine journalists who this week took the floor to denounce the harassment they have suffered for many years, with colleagues from the huge public news agency Télam that closed a few months ago and was transformed this week into a government advertising agency, and with colleagues from large and independent media.”
The jury, made up of Martín Caparrós (Argentina), Sabrina Duque (Ecuador) and Karina Sainz (Venezuela), highlighted “a memorable text in every sense” for its research, approach and quality of prose, “a complete portrait of a moral, social and criminal landscape.” They also valued this journalistic piece that brings to the table a little-discussed topic and that “recounts brutality and rescue from an original and ambitious perspective.” “The text is wonderfully written, maintains the literary pulse until the end and shocks with images that are not easy to forget,” they declared. The jury of photographers composed of Alejandro Cegarra (Venezuela), Silvia Omedes (Spain) and Dani Yako (Argentina) described the Argentinean’s work as “a necessary, raw and denunciatory photo report with a powerful charge of tenderness and reflection on multispecies life on the planet.”
In Image The documentary was awarded Valley of the Isolated – The murder of Bruno and Dom (TV Globo) produced by a team of Brazilian journalists, which deals with the brutal murder of indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and English journalist Dom Phillips in the heart of the Amazon, and exposes a cycle of violence that dates back to the arrival of the first Europeans in the Javari Valley, the region with the largest number of isolated indigenous people in the world. The jury recognised a piece that “stands up to the geographical, human and social difficulties of the area” and “crosses the line of fear to tell the world that when someone is murdered, silence should not reign.”
In the field Audio The podcast of Mexican Nayelli López Reyes was recognized, Brave women: Guií chanáa (Spotify Studios and Oronda Studio), which gives voice to the women of the Triqui community of San Martín Itunyoso (Oaxaca), where the custom of selling women for marriage is still in force. The jury highlighted the excellent narration and sound production that “includes a great narrative and production work, since it can be heard in Spanish and in the native language of this people” and offers “an authentic and raw vision of sexual violence against women of the indigenous community.”
Finally, the best Roof was Amazon Underworlda cross-border project created by more than 30 journalists from Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela that provides a global view of the criminal ecosystem in the Amazon. The reporters went deep into the largest tropical forest in the world and managed to map a complex network of criminal groups that operate unchecked in six countries and contribute to the destruction of the most biodiverse area on the planet. The jury recognized this group that, using extensive data collection, field reporting and satellite images, “wrote eight long reports and built a map of the illicit companies that converge in this region.” In addition, it highlighted “the implementation of a work methodology that guaranteed the safety of the team” and could become a reference for “the academic community, other journalists and even government officials.”