Breach-Valdez Journalism Prize in Mexico: A Look Back at the Migrant Plight
Two investigations into the plight of migrants won the support of the jury members—including AFP—for this award, which honours the memory of two Mexican journalists murdered in 2017.
People gather in front of a circle of candles during the "Vigil for Remembrance and Justice" as part of the second anniversary of the migrant detention center fire that killed 40 people in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua State, Mexico on March 27, 2025. © Herika Martinez / AFP
The award, which carries a prize of €8,000 in both categories, is named after two Mexican journalists murdered in 2017, Miroslava Breach and Javier Valdez. Javier Valdez was AFP's correspondent in the state of Sinaloa, home to the Sinaloa cartel, and founder of the magazine Rio 12.
"We're Not Going to Open the Door to Them." Under this headline, three journalists from La Verdad de Ciudad Juarez revisit the death of 40 Central American and Venezuelan citizens in a detention centre fire on March 27, 2023, in Ciudad Juarez, on the US border.
Using surveillance videos, Rocio Gallegos, Blanca Carmona, and Gabriela Minjares proved that agents from the National Migration Institute (INM) did nothing to open the door to the foreigners who set fire to mattresses in their cells to protest their detention conditions. The eight-month investigation is a collaboration between La Verdad, El Paso Matters, an independent media outlet based in Ciudad Juarez, and Lighthouse Reports, a collaborative journalism organisation.
The three journalists created the independent news website La Verdad "because there is very strong media control in Ciudad Juarez," explained Gallegos.
The winners in the Human Rights category receive a prize of 8,000 euros. The award also includes a trip to Paris, where one of the winners will be invited to spend a day with the AFP editorial team, and to Geneva.
In the Children's Rights category, Alberto Pradilla and Paul Ramirez demonstrated that Mexico arrests, detains, and deports more unaccompanied foreign minors than the United States.
At a reception centre in Honduras, they tracked down Wilmer, who had been deported from Mexico while trying to join his aunt in San Francisco. "In 2023, the centre received almost 2,000 unaccompanied children" deported from Mexico, compared to "barely 49 from the United States," explained Pradilla.
The two journalists work for N+, the news and investigative channel launched by the television giant Televisa two years ago.