The Gabo Awards 2026 also spotlighted murdered journalists, exiled journalists, war coverage and gender violence in newsrooms.
The 14th edition of the Gabo Festival took place from July 24 to 26, bringing together thousands of participants in Bogota, Colombia, to celebrate the best of journalism in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal.
The event is organized by the Gabo Foundation, created in 1995 by Colombian Nobel laureate in literature Gabriel Garcia Marquez — who was also a prominent journalist — along with Jaime Abello Banfi.
The main event of the festival is the presentation of the Gabo Award, which recognizes journalists with stellar careers and the best journalistic work in Ibero-America in the categories of audio, photography, text, and video or multimedia reporting.
The jury evaluated more than 1,915 entries from 20 countries to select the winners. This year, the awards recognized the work of several Brazilian journalists, honored journalists living in exile and recognized the career of Catalina Gomez Angel, a Colombian war correspondent who has covered conflicts in Iran and Ukraine.
But the ceremony also drew attention to the murder of two journalists in Colombia this year, the threat posed by growing authoritarianism around the world, and gender-based violence inside newsrooms.
Here are five key takeaways from the 2026 Gabo Awards:
Brazilian journalists received awards in three categories.
One of them was photojournalist Gabriela Bilo of Folha de S. Paulo, who won the Gabo Award in the photography category for the series "How Democracies Survive." Bilo documented the failed coup attempt by former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in 2023, an episode that culminated two years later in a historic trial that sentenced him to 27 years in prison.
During the awards ceremony, Bilo highlighted that in times when authoritarianism is spreading across the world, having witnessed the resilience of Brazilian institutions and democracy "is something that gives a little hope."
In the reportage category, the Metropoles team won for its multimedia project "The Bullet Policy," which meticulously documented the 246 fatal shootings committed by the Military Police in Sao Paulo under Gov. Tarcisio de Freitas. The analysis pushed back against official narratives about some of those deaths and showed that many of the victims were unarmed and were shot in the back.
The documentary "Terceirao – One Year, Four Lives," directed by Eliane Scardovelli and Caio Cavechini for TV Globo, won in the image category, which celebrates the best journalistic work in audiovisual formats.
The feature film closely follows four young people from different schools — a medicine student who discovers she has a brain tumor, a young woman from an upper class family, a dance student, and a young man torn between studying psychology or getting a job to support his family — to highlight the challenges facing Brazilian youth without relying on statistics or expert voices.
The awards also recognized the work of two exiled journalists from El Salvador.
The prize in the text category went to brothers Carlos and Oscar Martinez of the digital outlet El Faro for their long-form feature "Exile Catches Up to Us," in which they narrate the experience of activists, former officials and journalists like themselves who left the country bit by bit.
The Martinez brothers left El Salvador last year after publishing a series of interviews with gang leaders that revealed cooperation agreements struck with Nayib Bukele before he assumed the presidency. Their story recounts how what they initially considered a preventive and temporary departure gradually transformed into an acceptance of forced exile.
During an emotional presentation of the award by Carlos Fernando Chamorro — a veteran Nicaraguan journalist who also lives in exile — the brothers were defiant.
"Let the dictator and his servants understand this once and for all: Silence is not our option, it never has been and it never will be," Oscar Martinez said.
The award in the audio category went to the Spanish podcast "She Had the Same Name as Me," by investigative journalist Isabel Cadenas Canon. It tells the story of how the death of Begona Urroz more than six decades ago became the Day of Victims of Terrorism in Spain — despite being erroneously attributed as the first death caused by the Basque terrorist organization ETA.
The ceremony paid tribute to two Colombian journalists who were killed this year. Their families were present during the event.
Cristian Herrera Narino, a correspondent and board member of the Foundation for Press Freedom (FLIP), had spent years receiving threats due to his work and was killed in June in the city of Cúcuta.
Sofia Jaramillo, executive director of FLIP, said Herrera Narino learned journalism alongside his father, and his community knew him as the first journalist to arrive to cover any story and tell it well. She described his death as "the deepest wound in the organization's 30 years."
"This person, passionate about the craft of reporting, was a giant tree with deep roots whose reach we are still discovering," Jaramillo said.
Mateo Perez Rueda, a 24-year-old poet and director of the magazine El Confidente, was killed in May in the town of Yarumal, in the northwestern part of the country.
In a 2021 editorial about the impact of violence on families, Perez Rueda wrote: "Every time a young person is killed, at least 150 other people die behind him. The illusion of watching him grow and overcome life's obstacles in his own way [and] the fire of the heart when greeting him in the street."
"Those words today also speak of Mateo," Jaramillo said.
Since 1938, 171 journalists have been killed in Colombia, according to FLIP.
The event also put the spotlight on gender-based violence inside and outside newsrooms.
Jineth Bedoya Lima, founder of the It's No Time to Be Silent initiative, emphasized that hundreds of female journalists have faced sexual harassment in their workplaces. This year, a wave of harassment complaints involving female journalists in Colombia renewed attention to the issue under the #YoTeCreoColega initiative.
"We in the media cannot pontificate about how to counter violence if we tolerate or ignore it in our own newsrooms. That is the other threat to press freedom that we don't want to talk about," Bedoya Lima said. "Who thinks about the violence faced by the very people who report, the violence that today, at this moment, hundreds of women face in their own newsrooms?"
Finally, the award for journalistic excellence went to Catalina Gomez Angel, a Colombian war correspondent recognized for her work covering Iran and Ukraine. Despite being far from Latin America, the effects of those conflicts "end up altering its political, economic, and social life," the Gabo Prize Governing Council said.
"While others focus on the motivation in political war, she restores a face to those who live through its consequences," said Jaime Abello Banfi, CEO and co-founder of the Gabo Foundation, during the award ceremony.
Gomez Angel said she received the recognition with great joy and a sense of responsibility.
"I do it on behalf of many Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking women who have chosen to report on the world far from our borders, women who try to understand societies [...] and give them a face, who believe that the world must be narrated through different voices. I wish there were many more women doing this."
