Acceptance speech given on September 8 upon receiving the 2024 Maria Moors Cabot Prize at Columbia University. Leer en español.
It is with gratitude that I receive this recognition of my 24-year career in journalism. It thus seems important that I briefly share with you some of the things I have learned along the way.
I was born in El Salvador when the civil war was already an inevitability. I lived my whole childhood during that war. I became a journalist thanks to the arrival of democracy, and my generation very quickly took to testing out our newfound liberties obtained through the sacrifice and blood of many. The country was a blank canvas. I soon joined a troop of students drawn to a new journalistic project, El Faro — one which would have been impossible just six years earlier. It was a tiny little news outlet born into the wondrous novelty that was the internet in El Salvador at the end of the last century: an invention that would connect us to the world, that would make information and knowledge not a privilege of the few, but a good possessed by all.
We took to believing things, with the resolve with which the young believe them: I believed, for example, that the purpose of journalism was to change the world — for better, that is. And that, in order to do so, it was indispensable —and sufficient— that we investigate with ruthless rigor; that we listen with infinite patience to reality, so that it would reveal to us its deeper motives and secret alleyways; that we write as beautifully as we could muster. This was the path, I thought, in order for us to put ourselves in others’ shoes, and thereby understand them. I believed that, if we managed to tell at least one truth, there would be one fewer lie roaming free in the world.
But we were wrong. I was wrong. The painting created on that blank canvas was not what we had imagined: Three decades after the end of the civil war, we lost our democracy again.
My country is governed by one single man who carries his primary weapon at the ready: the tale of a country that does not exist. The shadows of yesterday that we believed we could exorcize from the region are still lurking: opulence feeding on misery, exclusion of the majority, by design, in our countries; corruption without limits; organized crime etched in the DNA of our republics.
Lies reign like never before. Multimillionaire caudillos have convinced the world, through their internet fiefdoms, that freedom means the right to lie, the right to deceive people into making decisions that harm them. And we journalists preach to the sea our findings and discoveries, which end up shipwrecked like paper boats amid waves of rage and disinformation.
That is the truth, and the young people who are getting started in this profession need to know it. I am proud to do it precisely because I know this truth, one that would have shattered my heart when I was a young boy: we journalists almost never change anything. Our profession does not entail changing the world, but rather dreaming of doing so; of girding ourselves with steely convictions and holding onto them like castaways, dreaming that if we investigate with ruthless rigor, if we listen with infinite patience to reality, if we write as beautifully as we can muster, we will manage to tell at least one truth, and there will be one fewer lie roaming free in the world.
