“The survivors forgotten by justice” wins the 2022 Breach-Valdez Prize
May 12, Mexico City – A report about women who survived attempted femicide has won the Breach-Valdez Prize, which honours human rights and freedom of the press.
The prizewinner Gloria Piña has won a trip to Paris that will include a visit to AFP headquarters, where she will meet with the heads of the Agency. Gloria will also travel to the UN headquarters in Geneva. Several UN agencies are members of the jury, as well as the French and Swiss embassies.
AFP has been a member since 2018 of the jury for the Breach-Valdez Prize, which is named after two journalists murdered in Mexico in 2017: Miroslava Breach and Javier Valdez.
Valdez co-founded the investigative magazine Riodoce and also worked as AFP correspondent in Sinaloa state. Two of his murderers were given long prison sentences, which is uncommon in a country where such killings are often carried out with impunity.
“These women live in situations of extreme violence, who do not die but who are at constant risk of being killed,” Piña, 27, told AFP.
These survivors are also “forgotten by justice”, she said, and in her report revealed that among 1.7 million violent assaults on women registered in the last eight years, only 781 cases have gone to trial.
More than 3,000 women were killed in 2021 in Mexico, where women’s rights campaigners say there are 10 femicides every day.
Eleven reporters have been murdered already this year in Mexico, according to NGOs. The targets of these murders are mainly journalists working in states marked by narco violence.
