The Ortega y Gasset Awards, in their 40th edition, this Wednesday at the CaixaForum in Valencia, recognized a chilling story with Kafkaesque undertones from El Salvador, written by Julia Gavarrete, and a series of reports along the colossal Congo River, by Xavier Aldekoa Photo summarizing the horrors of the war in Ukraine by Santi Palacios and the career of one of the best Spanish language journalists, Martín Caparrós. The director of EL PAÍS, Pepa Bueno, has highlighted the work of the journalists who have covered the conflict in Ukraine over the past year: “Every day this year there has been a reason to fear on Ukrainian soil and a reason to be proud of the profession , who does not flee from barbarism, but represents it so that crimes do not go unpunished, so that the world may know about it”. “Journalists have an obligation like never before,” Bueno added after mentioning the Vox-sponsored no-confidence vote, “to provide our readers with bold and accurate information that will help them make sense of the world, this world of global cacophony and the use of bad guys words”.
Aimar Bretos, director of the Hora 25 program on Cadena SER, who chaired the event, first recalled that the awards recognize the best journalism of 2022. “A year in which today’s rhythms, which are always fast, were very fast. The circuits of information, geopolitics and society ran amok”.
Salvadoran journalist Julia Gavarrete, 33, has received the Best Research Award from the President of the Generalitat, Ximo Puig. A report detailing the escape of members of a family who feared arrest in Nayib Bukele’s ruled El Salvador despite no charges against them. Published last year in the digital newspaper El Faro, entitled A family that owes nothing flees the emergency regime, the story follows a 50-year-old woman and her two children in their 20s over several months through meetings in increasingly modest hotel rooms, in which they take refuge and which they rarely leave to buy food.
The article tells of their fear – their “cop-filled” nightmares – and their fear of going to jail and being embroiled in a trial like the one they experienced in 2017 when they were accused and acquitted of having links to “gang structures.” to have,” the defense of which left her on the brink of economic and psychological bankruptcy. Through her case, the reporter uncovers the trend in El Salvador, where, as part of Bukele’s declared war on the gangs, thousands of people have been arrested and hundreds precautionary jailed, with arguments that seem as flimsy as they are “nervous”. or with an open police file.
At the award ceremony, Gavarrete asserted that the protagonists of his report were fleeing and hiding “because in El Salvador, which is governed by Nayib Bukele, there is no way of proving innocence, let alone defending it.” And he has appreciated the courage of the people who, despite the “hostile context,” lend their voice to allow journalists to tell what is happening.
Madrid photojournalist Santi Palacios has won the best photography award for a snapshot summarizing the great drama of the war in Ukraine. This is a detailed photograph of Yablonska Street in Bucha, littered with the bodies of civilians who were executed by Russian troops before they fled the nearby town after their failed attempt to break the resistance, March 31, 2022 withdrawn from Kiev Ukraine with a blitzkrieg. Russian soldiers killed at least 420 civilians and committed other atrocities, including multiple rapes and amputations, survivors later reported.
Born in Madrid in 1985, Palacios, who received the award from journalist and screenwriter Isabel Calderón, recalled that after the first photos of the massacre were published, what struck him most was how easy it was for the Kremlin to “put the shadows on sow”. a doubt” about a massacre that he and many other journalists reported on. “Today we have more information than ever before, and at the same time we have a high percentage of the population that does not know how to properly assess the reliability of the sources.” Next, the journalists of EL PAÍS Cristian García and María Sahuquillo, the months spent reporting on the war tells how they saw firsthand the tragedy experienced by Ukrainians – for example being forced, like an old woman from Severodonetsk, to boil water on their own― as well as the difficulty and risk of their lives being a reporter in Ukraine.
Cooperation
Xavier Aldekoa received the award for the best multimedia coverage for the series Río Congo. A journey from the springs to the mouth of the great river of Africa, which he published in La Vanguardia. Aldekoa embarked on an adventure of Homeric proportions that he had had in mind since childhood, and he compiled it into eight accounts combining text, video and photos (taken with his cell phone). As he usually does in his articles and in the books he has written about the continent—Océano África, Hijos del Nile and Indestructibles, to which Quixote in the Congo has now added an expanded version of the eight reports published in the press—The Born in Barcelona 41 years ago, a journalist looks around, talks to people, provides context and narrates African reality through stories like that of Idi Kamango and Mbuyu Alain, father and son aged 64 and 48, who each morning read the “underground Russian Roulette”, because of the high collapse hazard that is their artisanal cobalt mine.
Or that of Sara Lokumbé, who survives in Kinshasa and sells peanuts and biscuits to drivers stuck in traffic in the mammoth Congolese capital, which is growing by 600,000 inhabitants every year. Lokumbé, from a town 600 kilometers up the river, tells the journalist: “We all come here for the same reason: to work. You come here hoping to find a formal job to save some money so you can go back to your village and build a house with a yard. But that job never comes and you’re stuck. If you are poor you cannot escape once you enter Kinshasa.”
Aldekoa has confirmed the choral profession: “Before I left I thought I would do this work alone, but in reality it was a team effort.” And he thanked the dozens of Congolese who helped him, La Vanguardia director Jordi Juan, who accepted his plan to go “between two and five months” to explore the river, and his colleagues at the newspaper who helped to edit the photos and edit videos and to compile the reports.
Most recently, Pepa Bueno presented the career award to Argentinian Martín Caparrós, one of the best chroniclers of the Spanish language. Caparrós has been writing in newspapers and magazines since he was 16 (he is 65), has published novels (winning the Planeta or Herralde prizes), chronicles and essays, including the monumental El Hambre, with which he has himself successfully faced the excessive challenge of counting world hunger.
The winner, who first collaborated with EL PAÍS in 1985, has done so regularly for almost a decade, celebrating a few birthdays by gifting his friends with books written just for them and delivering his speech in gaucho verse, at which it was almost a joke . Caparrós was grateful to be recognized for the newspaper he reads. “Where since I was a child I have been reading what I want to write that made me want to exist in this very tricky business.” “Today they reward me for never following the rules and always looking for ways to escape from yesterday. Yesterday is a guide, but not to captivate us”, “how many times have they told me: Martín do this or that, and I, very neither fu nor fa, because I always lost desire, with the sacred forms a crook to be “. “For a journalist, there is nothing worse than working as a notary,” he concluded.
Second time in Valencia
At the beginning of the event, President Puig, himself a journalist, dedicated his speech to trade. “The obligation is to be independent, never neutral. The only thing against journalism is sectarianism, it really deserves a vote of no confidence.”
The Ortega y Gasset Awards, which EL PAÍS presents each year to recognize the best journalism published in Spanish, have been presented in Valencia for the second consecutive year. On this occasion in the Ágora, the last of the buildings designed by Santiago Calatrava in the City of Arts and Sciences, which remained practically unused from its inauguration in 2009 until last year when the La Caixa Foundation made it one of its cultural buildings centers. Each prize is endowed with 15,000 euros and the winners will also receive a work by Chillida. The award ceremony was sponsored by the Generalitat, the Provincial Council of Valencia and Balearia and took place in collaboration with the La Caixa Foundation and Renfe.
The jury for this edition consisted of Miguel Delibes de Castro, biologist; Lucía Lijtmaer, writer and journalist; Elvira Lindo, writer; Isabel Calderón, journalist; Pepa Bueno, director of EL PAÍS; Soledad Alcaide, defender of the reader of EL PAÍS; Luis Gómez, journalist, and Pedro Zuazua, the newspaper’s communications director, who served as secretary.