Winners

Edgar Cherubini Lecuna is a journalist who specialized in investigation journalism in 1972. He writes for El National, El Universal, El Tiempo, Economía Hoy, El Siglo y Venezuela Analítica. He made special reports for the BBC in London, ABC, VTV, TVE TVE España,Cousteau Society y Venevisión on political, historical, social, and cultural matters in Venezuela and Latin America. He is also the author of several books.

Since the age of 20, Maria Paz Cuevas Silva has been working as a columnist and journalist in the newspaper El Mercurio. She made reports and interviews for the magazine Fibra from 2004 to 2005. Since then, she works as a free-lance journalist in different chilean newspapers : Revista Paula, Caras, La Nación, Las Ultimas Noticias. She also teaches writing at the Diego Portales University.

For his 2008 prize-winning article, Raphael Gomide went undercover in the Rio de Janeiro Police Department, the most lethal in Brazil. In 2007, Rio set a macabre record of 1 330 civilians and 151 officers killed in alleged shootings. The Police Department is frequently accused of corruption, crime and flouting human rights. To learn about its ideology and role in training officers, Raphael passed a public competition and underwent a month of police training. He chose to go undercover to try to understand the police from within, without censorship. He heard colleagues promising to kill rather than arrest criminals, and instructors teaching techniques to forge a crime scene so they could claim self defence. Through the testimony of officers, the story reveals that the police tolerate and encourage lethal violence. Raphael has been a journalist for over a decade and has worked for four top dailies in Brazil. He has also won the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism with the series of articles “Slaves of the 21st Century”.