The fourth edition of Breach/Valdez award of journalism and human rights returns at the “most opportune moment,” its organizers said Thursday, when Mexico mourns the murder of three journalists so far this year.
The call for this award, whose delivery was suspended in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, occurs a few days after the murders in Tijuana (northwest) of reporter Lourdes Maldonado and photojournalist Margarito Esquivel and columnist José Luis Gamboa in Veracruz (east).
“We are ratified by a lethal reality for the journalism and freedom of expression and illustrates a very painful record of Mexico as one of the most dangerous countries in the world for media professionals,” said Guillermo Fernández-Maldonado, representative in Mexico of the office of the UN High Commissioner for for Human Rights (UN-DH).
He also lamented that the vast majority of crimes committed by journalists “still await justice for those responsible.”
The prize will be awarded this year to the two best journalistic works with a human rights approach published during 2020 and 2021, which will be received from January 28 to March 11.
The award ceremony will be on May 3, within the framework of International Press Freedom Day, the organizers added.
The award consists of a trip to Europe to hold meetings that manage to broaden the information on the situation of the journalists in Mexico and generate networks, as well as a double scholarship at the private Ibero-American University (IBERO), lasting up to one year.
Griselda Triana, communicator and widow of reporter Javier Valdez – one of those after whom the award is named – stressed that this is a wake-up call to the Mexican State “so that it recognizes the deficiencies and incapacities of the mechanisms that are supposed to protect life of journalists”.
Valdez, who collaborated with the AFP and was co-founder of the Ríodoce magazine, was killed by drug-trafficking hitmen in Sinaloa (northwest) on May 15, 2017; while Miroslava Breach, a reporter focused on organized crime and corruption, was murdered in Chihuahua (north) on March 23, 2017.
The Breach/Valdez award is sponsored by UN agencies, the French and Swiss embassies, IBERO’s Press and Democracy program, Reporters Without Borders and AFP.
