The journalists Juan José Martínez (El Salvador, 37 years old) and Bryan Avelar (El Salvador, 30 years old), friends and freelance, They chose to tell the story of the battle of Moskitia, in Honduras, against drug trafficking. Although more than a battle, it is the destruction of a corner of the world at the hands of drug cartels. “The most violent face of neoliberalism with one of the most vulnerable populations in all of Latin America,” explains Martínez, an anthropologist who 10 years ago chose to become a journalist to tell in a simpler way what he previously wrote in his studies. “We decided to shed light on an abandoned population, in an abandoned region, in an abandoned country,” Avelar describes.
And together they embarked on a project of almost two years, about a land that had barely occupied any space in the press. “The Miskitos were eager for journalists to arrive, they asked us to please come,” Avelar recalls. A work that Martínez defines as “ethnographic journalism”, with the tagline of “long wind”, organized in three chapters and more than 60 pages, published by Insight Crime, and now awarded the Ortega y Gasset for the best journalistic story or investigation. Martínez celebrates the “very risky bet” of the non-profit medium, for a “classic, old journalism, from yesteryear, of sending two reporters to go into the jungle,” in a time of reels from Instagram and TikTok. “If we surrender to the logic of entertaining, not informing, the ones who will be killing journalism will be the journalists,” he adds.
But both are optimistic. “There are people who want to read a good story, I don't think the population has become illiterate,” says Martínez. And although this type of in-depth journalism requires time that seems to have disappeared and money that no one knows very well where to get from, he does not believe that it has stopped being liked: “It is still alive, in the universities, in the towns.” And other media also practice it, which Martínez cites in succession: Catopard either The lighthouse either Dromamaniacs... Avelar adds that it is possible to make a living from it. “With the individual chronicle as freelance you would be a slave to the bank account. But with long-term projects that give you stability, six or eight months, it is possible,” says this journalist, who left his stable position at the magazine. Factumin El Salvador, to tell other stories.
To grab the reader by the chest, and not let them abandon them, the authors of Moskitia: The Honduran jungle that is drowning in cocaine they borrow “literary elements.” The objective is “to make these complex things a story, a story that is easy to read,” defends Martínez, already in Barcelona with Avelar to pick up his Ortega y Gasset. “I found out that he had been awarded when he was being deported from Haiti to the Dominican Republic,” Martínez recalls. He answered the phone somewhat roughly: “What do you want? I'm very busy”. When they told him the reason, he ran to call Avelar. “I was on the southern border of Mexico, where there is a humanitarian crisis, a kind of babel of misery,” he says. When Martínez yelled at him “we have it! We have it!”, he thought he was referring to some documents from another project they were working on. “When I understood that it was Ortega y Gasset, I started shouting in the middle of the street.” Each celebrates what he considers to be an “endorsement of the teachers” in his own way. Martínez sees it as a commitment to “old and new at the same time” journalism. Avelar remembers the journalist Alma Guillermoprieto: “As the teacher says, Being a journalist is the privilege of seeing the world from the front lines, and the commitment to tell the story and tell it well.”
#Juan #José #Martínez #Bryan #Avelar #research #work #surrender #logic #entertaining #kill #journalism