Journalist Pepe Naranjo receives the 2021 Padre Arrupe Award


Naranjo has been distinguished in the category of Journalism and Communication, where he was a finalist together with the independent journalist and photographer Javier Bauluz, Pulitzer Prize winner in 1995 and Journalism and Human Rights Prize in 2016. “With this award we want to recognize and give visibility to people and institutions with great experience in the defense and promotion of human rights in the area of ​​migration and refuge ”, declared Alberto Ares, director of the IUEM, whose award ceremony will take place on May 26 and could be followed via streaming through the institution's website.

"I understand this award as a recognition of counting Africa from Africa", he declares


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Naranjo, a regular contributor to different national media such as El País, LA PROVINCIA, Mundo Negro or Radio Nacional, adds this new award to a list headed by the Canary Islands Communication Award in 2016, the Cross of the Order of Civil Merit of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. from Spain and the I Saliou Traoré Prize for journalism in Spanish on Africa, both in 2019, among others.

"I am very happy, as a 20-year-old kid, for this recognition by the IUEM, which carries out a very interesting training work on the reality of migration from the academic sphere," Naranjo declared yesterday, in a telephone conversation from Senegal. «Above all, I feel great joy and gratitude because I understand that this award is not only a recognition of an effort and commitment to tell different realities about Africa, but from Africa, which is what I have been doing since I decided to settle in Dakar in 2011 », he points out, adding that« it has also been a pride to share the nomination with Javier Bauluz, who has developed a very interesting work in the Canary Islands with his project La ruta canaria, where he documents the shame of the Arguineguín pier and the violation of human rights upon arrival on the islands.

On the other hand, Naranjo points out that his long career in defense of the human rights of migrants goes back to his beginnings in journalism, “with the coverage of the arrival of the first cayucos to Fuerteventura and Lanzarote in the early 90's ». «At the end of that decade I traveled for the first time to Africa, where I identified, on the one hand, that there was a great lack of knowledge about the continent, because we have a fixed and preconceived photo of its realities, which are many and diverse; and on the other hand, that there were hardly any Spanish journalists reporting from the continent, "he says. "And still today, ten years after living here, I continue to discover, surprise and understand things about Africa."

The journalist was a finalist together with the photographer Javier Bauluz, Pulitzer Prize winner in 1995


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However, Naranjo is immersed these days in the informative coverage of the complex crisis in the Sahel area in the face of the advance of terrorism and armed violence, where at the end of last April the Spanish journalists David Beriain and Roberto Fraile were murdered by the attack by a jihadist group in Burkina Faso, as well as some thirty civilians, in the same region, last week. "In Burkina Faso alone, one of the Sahel regions that has been left out of the control of the Army and the Police, there are already 1.1 million internally displaced persons fleeing insecurity," says Naranjo about one of the worst massacres that have occurred. in this African country since the terrorist attacks began in 2015. "These are very tough times and the coverage is complicated, but necessary," he concludes.

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