Rosario Mosso Castro, investigative reporter and editor-in-chief of Mexican magazine ZETA, and U.S. photojournalist Meridith Kohut, who documents the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, are recipients of the 2018 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF).
Rosario Mosso Castro (IWMF)
Rosario Mosso Castro, investigative reporter and editor-in-chief of Mexican magazine ZETA, and U.S. photojournalist Meridith Kohut, who documents the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, are recipients of the 2018 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF).
The Courage in Journalism Awards “honors the brave journalists who report on taboo topics, work in environments hostile to women and share difficult truths.” According to IWMF, the number of female journalists killed in 2017 more than tripled from the previous year.
Mosso Castro covers criminal organizations, and links between authorities and drug traffickers in Baja California. She is also a journalism instructor and writes Zeta’s editorial section.
As noted by IWMF, her work has led to threats against her by criminal groups and security forces and she had needed bodyguards on three occasions.
“In the last decade, with an intense war against drug cartels in Mexico, she continued leading investigative teams to find out the mutations of organized crime in the north of Mexico,” IWMF wrote in a press release. “In spite of the threats and risks in one of the most dangerous countries to be a journalist, Mosso has always had a strong commitment to her work.”
Meridith Kohut (Twitter)
Kohut, who is based in Caracas, Venezuela, has spent the last three years documenting the economic and humanitarian crisis in the country for the foreign press.
Her work “is widely recognized as the largest and most comprehensive photographic archive of the crisis made by a single photographer,” according to the IWMF.
She was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography for her photography covering malnutrition and starvation of children in Venezuela. She has also worked in Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Colombia and Haiti and is a distinguished alumna of the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin.
In addition to Mosso Castro and Kohut, journalist Zehra Doğan of Turkey and NIma Elbagir, CNN correspondent in Sudan, also received the awards. CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes received the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
