Journalists Néstor Arce and Wilfredo Miranda, co-founders of Divergentes, received in Madrid, Spain, the 2022 Journalistic Excellence Award from the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), in the human rights category.
The SIP award was for the special multimedia «The challenge after the massacre», a series of reports that reconstructs the state repression led by the dictators Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo as a result of the social revolt of April 2018.
Miranda wrote on his Twitter account that the award was dedicated to Juan Lorenzo Holman, director of La Prensa and a political prisoner of the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship.
“If the Ortega-Murillo regime has not been able to do anything in all this time, it is to shut us up. We are committed to reinventing ourselves in exile to continue investigating and telling in the context of totalitarianism and gag that Nicaragua is going through,” the journalist tweeted.
The jury considered that Divergents presented “12 reports based on rigorous journalism and outstanding use of audiovisual resources, a multiple evaluation of the Daniel Ortega regime’s repression of citizen protests, in particular, the April 2018 massacre.”
Divergents also received an honorable mention in the in-depth journalism category, for the multimedia work “Predators of the ecosystem.” The journalistic piece has three deliveries that expose the increase in extractivism in Nicaragua since the return of the Ortega dictatorship to the Presidency.
In 2018, the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) awarded the Freedom of the Press Award to Nicaraguan journalists who documented the repression of the 2018 demonstrations, which left at least 355 dead, according to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
Ortega tried to “regulate” prizes for Nicaraguans
In August 2021, Ortega issued a decree that requires foreign countries and organizations to request the consent of their government to award prizes in favor of entities and individuals of Nicaraguan nationality.
The measure indicates that the management of international recognition will be done “through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs so that it grants the corresponding approval in terms of reciprocity.”
Outstanding writers and critics of the dictatorship, such as the Nicaraguan Sergio Ramírez, Cervantes Prize 2017; the poet and novelist Gioconda Belli and the late poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal have been awarded international prizes for their literary talent.
Several Nicaraguan journalists and opponents have also been distinguished for their work denouncing and defending human rights.
