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On Oct. 8, Carlos Ernesto Martínez was recognized at the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, which honor journalists and news organizations for career excellence and coverage of the Western Hemisphere that furthers inter-American understanding. Founded in 1938, the prizes are the oldest international journalism awards.
Over more than two decades, Martínez has established an outstanding journalism career in El Salvador and beyond that has made him one of the leading reporters in the Western Hemisphere. Today, his coverage of the expansion of gang activity is mandatory reading for anyone who wants to understand how criminal networks are devastating Central America, and how their influence is spreading across Mexico and the United States. He spent a decade investigating the phenomenon of violence in the Northern Triangle of Central America, particularly in the regional prison systems, the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, and their effects on Central American societies. He is also committed to covering the migration of undocumented Central Americans. Martínez is the author of the book Together, All Together, an account of the first caravan of Central American migrants that traveled through Mexico in their attempt to reach the United States. Below is an unedited transcript of his remarks (para leer en español, haz clic aquí).
Thank you very much to the Maria Moors Cabot jury and to the Columbia University authorities for deciding that my career deserves this immense honor—one that I choose to accept as a representative of my beleaguered Central America colleagues.
Thanks to my brave colleagues at El Faro, whom I admire and to whom I dedicate this recognition. Thanks to Carlos Dada, my mentor on this path and who is responsible for this career that you are now awarding. I want to thank my family—Edin, Marisa, Juan, Oscar—for being my inspiration and my shelter. And to you, Marlen, because without your companionship none of this would be possible. My career as a dreamer is dedicated solely to you.
I am grateful to accept this recognition of my twenty-four-year professional career. I’d like to briefly tell you some things that I have learned along the way.
I was born in El Salvador when the civil war was already inevitable, and I lived my entire childhood in the midst of that war. I became a journalist thanks to the arrival of democracy, and my generation was quick to try out the new freedoms achieved with the sacrifice and blood of so many.
The country was a blank canvas. Very early on, I joined a group of students attracted to a new journalistic project, El Faro, which would have been impossible just six years earlier. It was a small newspaper born at the end of the last century in that luminous novelty in El Salvador that was the internet—an invention that would connect us with the world, that would make information and knowledge not a privilege of a few, but a benefit possessed by all.
And so we set out with the determination of young people who believe in things: I believed, for example, that the purpose of journalism was to change the world, for the better. And that to do so it was essential—and sufficient—to investigate with ruthless rigor, to listen to reality with infinite patience so that it would reveal its deepest motives and show us its secret alleys; to write as beautifully as possible to get some people to put themselves in the shoes of others and thus understand them.
I believed that if we managed to tell at least one truth, there would be at least one less lie fluttering around the world.
But we were wrong. I was wrong. The painting we imagined was not drawn on that blank canvas: three decades after the end of the civil war, we lost our democracy again.
My country is governed by a single man who carries his main weapon at the ready—the story of a country that does not exist. The old shadows that we thought we could exorcise from the region are still there: the opulence that feeds on misery; the exclusion of the majority in the landscape of our countries; corruption without limits; organized crime embedded in the DNA of our republic.
Lies reign as never before. Multimillionaire warlords have convinced the world, through their fiefdoms on the internet, that freedom consists of the right to lie, the right to deceive people into making decisions that harm them. And we journalists preach to the sea about discoveries and findings that sink like paper boats amid the waves of rage and misinformation.
This is the truth, and the younger generation coming into this profession needs to know that. But I’m still proud to do it, and I will keep doing it.
I am proud to do it precisely because I know this truth, one that, as a boy, would have broken my heart beyond repair: we, journalists, almost never change anything.
Our job is not to change the world, but to continue to believe that we can do so; in arming ourselves with a bundle of convictions and tying ourselves to them like castaways, we dream that if we investigate with ruthless rigor, if we listen to reality with infinite patience, if we write as beautifully as possible, we will manage to tell at least one truth and that by doing so there will be one less lie fluttering around in the world.
Carlos Ernesto Martínez is a longtime investigative journalist at El Faro in El Salvador, covering violence, gangs, migration, and other topics.