Pepa Bueno: "Journalists have an obligation to help understand the world against the perverse use of words"

The Ortega y Gasset Awards, in their 40th edition, have distinguished this Wednesday at the CaixaForum in Valencia a terrifying story with Kafkaesque overtones from El Salvador, written by Julia Gavarrete, a series of reports along the colossal Congo River, by Xavier Aldekoa , a photograph that condenses the horror of the war in Ukraine, by Santi Palacios, and the career of one of the best journalists in the Spanish language, Martín Caparrós.

The director of EL PAÍS, Pepa Bueno, has highlighted the work of the journalists who have covered the conflict in Ukraine in the last year: "Every day this year there has been a reason for fear on Ukrainian soil and a reason for pride of a profession that does not flee from barbarism, but rather portrays it, so that crimes do not go unpunished, so that the world knows”.

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on Cadena SER, who directed the event, began by recalling that the awards reward the best journalism of 2022. "A year in which the rhythms of today, which are always fast, were very fast.

The informational, geopolitical and social cycles ran amok”.

Salvadoran journalist Julia Gavarrete, 33, has received the award for best investigation from the President of the Generalitat, Ximo Puig.

A report that tells of the flight of members of a family who fear being arrested in El Salvador governed by Nayib Bukele, despite the fact that there is no accusation against them.

Published last year in the digital newspaper

under the title

the story follows a 50-year-old woman and her two children, in their twenties, for several months through meetings in the increasingly humble hotel rooms where they take refuge, and from which they barely leave to buy food.

The article recounts their anguish —their nightmares “full of policemen”— and their fear of going to jail and being caught up in a judicial process like the one they experienced in 2017, when they were accused and acquitted of having ties to “gang structures”, whose defense left them on the verge of economic and psychological bankruptcy.

Through her case, the reporter exposes the drift in El Salvador, where in the framework of the war against the gangs declared by Bukele, thousands of people have been arrested, and hundreds of them preventively imprisoned, with arguments as flimsy as appearing “nervous” or having a police file open.

Gavarrete has affirmed when collecting the award that the protagonists of his report flee and hide "because precisely in El Salvador that Nayib Bukele governs there is no way to prove innocence, much less how to defend it."

And he has appreciated the courage of the people who, despite the "hostile context", lend their voices so that journalists tell what is happening.

The Madrid photojournalist Santi Palacios has received the award for best photography for a snapshot that summarizes the great drama of the war in Ukraine.

This is a detailed photograph of Yablonska Street in Bucha, strewn with the corpses of civilians executed by Russian troops before they withdrew from the town near Kiev on March 31, 2022, after their failed attempt to break resistance. Ukraine with a blitzkrieg.

Russian soldiers killed at least 420 civilians and committed other atrocities, including multiple rapes and amputations, survivors later recounted.

Palacios, born in Madrid in 1985, who received the award from the journalist and screenwriter Isabel Calderón, recalled that what struck him the most after publishing the first photographs of the massacre was how easy it had been for the Kremlin to "sow the shadow of a doubt” about a massacre that he and many other journalists were covering.

"Today we have more information than ever, and at the same time we have a high percentage of the population that does not know how to properly identify the reliability of the sources."

Next, the journalists from EL PAÍS Cristian García and María Sahuquillo, who have spent months covering the war, have told how they have seen first-hand the tragedy that the Ukrainians are experiencing ―forced, for example, like an old woman from Severodonetsk, to cook water alone-,

Teamwork

Xavier Aldekoa has received the award for best multimedia coverage for the

, which he published in

.

Aldekoa embarked on an adventure of Homeric scale that he had in his head since he was a child, and he summarized it in eight reports in which he combined text, videos and photographs (taken with his mobile phone).

As he usually does in his articles and in the books he has written about the continent —

,

and

, to which he has now added

, an extended version of the eight reports published in the press—, the journalist, born in Barcelona 41 years ago, looks around, talks to people, provides context and tells the African reality through stories like those of Idi Kamango and Mbuyu Alain, father and son aged 64 and 48, who every morning enter the "underground Russian roulette" due to the high risk of collapse, which is their artisanal cobalt mine.

Or that of Sara Lokumbé, who survives in Kinshasa selling peanuts and biscuits to drivers stuck in traffic jams in the mammoth Congolese capital, which every year gains 600,000 inhabitants.

Lokumbé, from a town 600 kilometers upriver, tells the journalist: “We all come here for the same thing: to work.

You come here hoping to find a formal job to save a little so you can go back to your village and build a house with a garden.

But that job never comes and you get stuck.

If you are poor, when you enter Kinshasa you cannot escape anymore”.

Aldekoa has vindicated the choral nature of the trade: "Before leaving, I thought I was going to do this work alone, but in reality it has been a team effort."

And he thanked the dozens of Congolese who helped him, the director of

, Jordi Juan, who accepted his plan to go "between two and five months" to explore the river, and his colleagues from the newspaper who helped edit the photos and videos and to assemble the reports.

Lastly, Pepa Bueno presented the award for Professional Career to the Argentine Martín Caparrós, one of the best chroniclers in the Spanish language.

Caparrós has been writing since he was 16 (he is 65) in newspapers and magazines, and has published novels (and won with them the Planeta or the Herralde Prize), books of chronicles and essays, among them the monumental El Hambre, with which

confronted successfully the excessive challenge of counting hunger in the world.

The winner, who collaborated for the first time with EL PAÍS in 1985, has done so regularly for almost a decade, and has celebrated some birthdays by giving his friends books written just for them, has given his speech in "almost joker" gaucho verses.

Caparrós has been grateful to be awarded for the newspaper that he reads.

"Where since I was a child I read what I would like to write, the one that made me persist in this very tricky trade."

“Today they reward me for never having complied with the rules and always looking for ways to escape from yesterday.

Yesterday is a guide, but not to chain us”, “how many times did they tell me: Martín do this or that, and I, very neither fu nor fa, because I always lost the desire to be a crook with the consecrated forms”.

"There is nothing worse for a journalist than working as a notary", he concluded.

For the second time in Valencia

At the start of the act, President Puig, himself a journalist, also dedicated his speech to the trade.

“The obligation is to be independent, never neutral.

The only thing opposed to journalism is sectarianism, that really deserves a vote of no confidence”.

The Ortega y Gasset Awards, which EL PAÍS awards each year to recognize the best journalism published in Spanish, have been delivered for the second consecutive edition in Valencia.

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 turned it into one of its cultural centers.

Each prize is endowed with 15,000 euros and the winners also receive a work by Chillida.

The award ceremony has been sponsored by the Generalitat, the Valencia Provincial Council and Balearia, and has had the collaboration of the La Caixa Foundation and Renfe.

The jury for this edition was made up 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, Communications Director of the newspaper, who served as secretary.