Honoring reporting on Latin America & the Caribbean
The Maria Moors Cabot Prizes are the oldest international awards in journalism and were founded in 1938. The prizes recognize journalists and news organizations with a distinguished body of work that has contributed to Inter-American understanding.
2016 Maria Moors Cabot Prize Winners Announced
New York, NY, July 20 — Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism announced the 2016 winners of the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes for outstanding reporting on the Americas. They represent a new generation of journalists reporting across platforms. The 2016 Cabot Prize winners are Rodrigo Abd, Associated Press, United States; Rosental C. Alves, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, United States; Margarita Martínez, filmmaker, Colombia; Óscar Martínez, El Faro, El Salvador. The Maria Moors Cabot Special Citation is awarded toMarina Walker Guevara, Panama Papers Reporting Team, International Consortium of Journalists (ICIJ). En Español
The Cabot Prizes honor journalists for career excellence and coverage of the Western Hemisphere that furthers inter-American understanding. Godfrey Lowell Cabot of Boston founded the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes as a memorial to his wife in 1938. They are the oldest international journalism awards.
Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger will present gold medals with a $5,000 honorarium to each winner as well as a certificate to the citation honoree at a dinner and ceremony on Tuesday, October 18, at Low Library on the university’s Morningside Heights campus.
“The journalistic excellence displayed by the four 2016 Cabot Medalists — and by the recipient of this year’s special citation for reporting on the Panama Papers — reminds us just how much we rely on courageous reporting beyond our borders to be well-informed members of a global society,” said Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger. “The work of these honorees has made largely hidden events visible to the world. The Maria Moors Cabot Prize is both the oldest award in international journalism and one of the most relevant to current day challenges of democratic governance.”
2016 Cabot Medalists
With untiring commitment and uncommon empathy, photographer Rodrigo Abd, Associated Press, United States, has created close-up images of people in Latin America that illuminate urgent social issues. He invests long hours and runs extraordinary risks to get inside the lives of his subjects. On a Caracas hillside and in Guatemalan barrios, he spends time with gang members, starkly revealing their cult of violence. He looks at those who are usually overlooked, plunging into Guatemalan sewer waters and climbing to Andean coca fields to show the struggles so many face in the region.
His camera also celebrates the Americas, capturing the joy of a rural village family when a new child is born. Always looking for new challenges, , he experiments with technique, using a box camera, for example, to make portraits that display the dignity of Mayan women. With riveting photographs, Abd projects the immediacy of his stories to audiences across the hemisphere and beyond.
Rosental C. Alves, Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, United States, is a truly innovative leader in a changing media landscape who has made significant contributions to a new generation of journalists in the Americas and beyond.
After almost three decades of an outstanding career in Brazilian journalism, including two decades of reporting and editing at Jornal do Brasil, Alves became a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. From academia, he uses his experience, knowledge and engaging personality to expand the reach and quality of journalism across platforms. In 2002, Alves founded the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, a UT Austin outreach program that has trained thousands of journalists in Latin America and the Caribbean and publishes a blog covering news related to journalism and freedom of the press in the region. Throughout his career, Alves has upheld and promoted the essential role of journalists, informing citizens while fostering international understanding, particularly in the Americas.
As an independent television and film producer, Margarita Martínez, filmmaker, Colombia, has explained the nuances of the Colombian conflict and its complex culture in a simple, compelling and engaging way. Over the course of her career, she has covered Colombia’s two peace processes, the height of the urban war in Medellin by following the lives of three young people in a violent neighborhood dominated by paramilitary groups, and has told the story of indigenous people fighting for land through peaceful means.
Martínez demonstrates originality and a knack for capturing the public’s attention. She successfully brought the documentary format to Colombian television and to a mass audience. Her films are shown in universities, forums and film festivals throughout the United States and Latin America, contributing to inter-American understanding of Colombia and, indeed, of Latin America’s poor, its gangs, its children and its brave journalists. Through her riveting documentary work, she gives vision and voice to Latin American citizens.
With extraordinary courage and tenacity, Óscar Martínez, El Faro, El Salvador, has chronicled the most important and urgent stories of the Western Hemisphere. He has written about mass migration, organized crime and the violence tearing apart much of the region. He has explained these phenomena to a wide audience with moving prose and indefatigable detail.
To describe the desperate journey migrants make from his native El Salvador and other parts of Central America across a treacherous Mexico to the United States, Martínez spent neither days nor weeks but years with his subjects. He has repeatedly ridden the notorious Bestia (The Beast), the perilous train that migrants slip aboard, hoping to avoid murderous drug cartels and their corrupt police allies. Martínez is an intrepid reporter who takes great risks to expose remarkable stories, without sacrificing language and compelling narrative. His brave reporting and expressive talent enhance our understanding of Latin America.
Special Citation: Marina Walker Guevara, Panama Papers Reporting Team, ICIJ
The jury has decided to give a special citation to Argentine journalist Marina Walker Guevara, ICIJ’s deputy director, and the team that coordinated the Panama Papers, a series of investigative stories reported by more than 100 partners throughout the world. Under Director Gerard Ryle, Walker Guevara was the project manager of an unprecedented collaborative effort that revealed how a Panamanian law firm assisted world elites in sheltering wealth through offshore tax havens.
Thanks to the outstanding work of Walker Guevara and her team, which included two other Latin Americans and two Spanish journalists, the Panama Papers investigations brought together dozens of investigative journalists in Latin America, and their publications, exposing possible tax fraud, money laundering and other suspicious movements of money by political figures, corporations and criminals. The series prompted a much needed debate about transparency and accountability in the region and around the world.
The team trained journalists in their language and taught them how to use a digital platform containing millions of documents. It helped them navigate the complicated database and interpret intricate layers of information, making it possible for reporters to collaborate across competing media organizations within the same country and on other continents.
For their leadership and for the impact their collective effort is having on the region and the world, Marina Walker Guevara and the ICIJ Panama Papers Reporting Team deserve a special citation in the 2016 Maria Moors Cabot Prize.