The Diplomat
The Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and the EFE news agency announced last Wednesday the names of the winners of the King of Spain International Journalism Awards 2022.
“Research and the ‘live’ account of the great challenges facing Ibero-America and the world, such as violence, the environmental struggle, political corruption, social rights or cultural integration, are the focus of the six award-winning works,” the AECID said in a press release. The winners, selected from a total of 240 nominations from 17 countries, come from Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela and Spain.
The awards have been given annually since 1983 to recognize the work of Spanish- and Portuguese-language journalism professionals from the Ibero-American Community of Nations and from countries with which Spain maintains historical ties and cultural and cooperation relations. The King of Spain International Journalism Awards have an economic amount of 10,000 euros and the winners also receive a sculpture by the artist Joaquín Vaquero Turcios. The Awards have been presented since their inception by the now Emeritus King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia, and later by Philip VI and Queen Letizia. Previous winners include writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Spain’s Arturo Pérez Reverte.
The jury chose as best work in the Narrative Journalism category El magnicidio del presidente de Haití, published in Noticias Caracol de Colombia with exclusive information on the assassination of Jovenel Moise in 2021. Colombia was also awarded in Photography thanks to the image Resistir, by photographer César Luis Melgarejo Aponte, published in the newspaper El Tiempo in the context of the national strike in that country in May 2021.
The jury also valued the difficulties in accessing the data used in the work La promesa rota: el colapso de la seguridad social en Venezuela, prepared by a team of 20 professionals headed by Salvador Benasayag and published in the web portal Prodavinci on February 23, 2021, and awarded in the category International Cooperation and Humanitarian Action.
The prize in the Environmental category went to the report Engolindo Fumaça (Swallowing Smoke), on the health effects of forest fires, published in InfoAmazonia of Brazil. The report Hija del algodón: Un perfil de Cristina Rivera Garza, published by Sergio Rodríguez Blanco in the Mexican magazine Gatopardo on March 23, 2021, was awarded the Cultural Journalism Award, “for its ability to reflect the contribution of Hispanics to the creation of U.S. culture”. Likewise, the Spanish non-profit foundation Civio was awarded in the Ibero-American Media category for its work in the pursuit of transparency, truthfulness of data and accountability.
The president of the jury, Antón Leis, director of the AECID, stated that the aim of the awards is “to achieve a fairer society, something necessary as reflected in the current events of these days with the Russia-Ukraine war, in which the first victim is being the truthful information”. For her part, the president of the EFE Agency, Gabriela Cañas, vice-president of the jury, declared that “the award winners, with their work, are loudspeakers of the problems of the most disadvantaged or X-rays of the complex diversity of Ibero-America”.
