El Diario de Juárez, a major newspaper in the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez – one of the world’s most violent cities – won the 2011 award for journalistic excellence, organized by the Mexico branch of PEN International.
PEN Mexico president Jennifer Clement said the prize was to honor “the great courage” of the newspaper in continuing to inform the public, as well as its work in promoting female journalist professional development.
In October 2010, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo honored two Diario journalists for their “extraordinary valor” in covering drug trafficking and the killing of women in the city.
Since 2008, two Diario journalists have been killed: crime reporter Armando Rodríguez in November 2008 and photography intern Luis Carlo Santiago Orozco in October 2010. In response to this violence, some insurers have refused to cover journalists in Ciudad Juárez.
Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
