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On Friday, July 24, El Faro’s managing editor Óscar Martínez and reporter Carlos Martínez won the Gabo Award in the Text category, one of the most important honors in Ibero-American journalism.
Every year in Colombia, a series of awards from the Gabo Foundation —founded by literary giant Gabriel García Márquez— recognizes “the stories that best explain our times” in Spanish and Portuguese.
The Martínez brothers’ award-winning feature is called Exile reaches us. El Faro English translated it in our digital magazine in July 2025: A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus.
Their work chronicles the exile of El Faro’s own journalists, as well as dozens of Salvadoran colleagues, human rights defenders, and voices critical of Nayib Bukele’s government. They were forced to leave the country in a wave of repression against the press and civil society.
The story “succeeds as a constant reminder, through the unique nature of journalism as self-narration, that this profession is a beacon of democracy,” wrote the juryincluding journalists Mónica Baró of Cuba, Catarina Carvalho of Portugal, and Isabela Ponce of Ecuador.
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A First-Hand Account of a Salvadoran Exodus
The feature includes photographs by El Faro photojournalist Carlos Barrera, who was also a finalist for this year’s Gabo Award in the Photography category for his photo essay, Here in Guatemala Trump’s deportees cry.
Barrera’s work was translated into English as Guatemala’s Tarmac of Tears for El Faro English’s magazine last November.
Barrera documented the return of Guatemalan migrants deported from the United States. He saw how, upon arrival in Guatemala City, many confronted the abrupt end of their life plans in the US
Last year, Barrera won the World Press Photo Award with a series on the state of exception in effect in El Salvador since 2022.
El Faro’s journalism has now been recognized with four Gabo Awards. In 2016, the newsroom collectively received the Award for Excellence. It was the first time the Foundation presented the award to a newsroom as a whole.
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In 2021, El Faro won in the Coverage category, together with Spanish newspaper El Paísfor Southern Border (Southern BorderEdit), a multimedia series on Central American, African, Asian, and Garifuna migrants crossing the border between Central America and Mexico.
That year, El Faro and La Jaula Abierta won in the Image category for Unforgivable (Unforgivable), a documentary telling the story of Giovanny, an 18th Street gang hitman. After converting to Evangelical Christianity, his relationship with another man was a sin that neither the church nor the gang was willing to forgive.
“Silence is not an option”
Óscar Martínez has been with El Faro since 2007 and has served as the newsroom’s managing editor since 2020. He co-founded the renowned investigative unit Sala Negra and is the author of multiple books in English: The Beast, A History of Violenceand The Hollywood Kidall with Verso Books.
His most recent title in Spanish is Bukele, the naked king (Anagrama, 2026).
Óscar Martínez has received some of the most prestigious awards in international journalism, including the Maria Moors Cabot Prize and the Committee to Protect Journalists’ International Press Freedom Award.
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El Faro’s Carlos Martínez Wins Maria Moors Cabot Prize
Carlos Martínez, a leading investigator of violence in Central America for over a decade, has had a hand in all four of El Faro’s Gabo Awards. I have received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize in 2024 and the Ortega y Gasset Prize in 2011.
Since 2012, Carlos Martínez has authored El Faro’s investigations into negotiations between governments, political parties, and the gangs of El Salvador. He is the author of the Spanish-language book Together, all together (Logroño, 2019), a chronicle of the first caravan of Central American migrants that year.
“It is an immense honor that we receive with a strange feeling. We would have preferred not to have had to write this piece. It was only bearable thanks to the support of our family,” said Carlos Martínez at the award ceremony.
He also called on the more than 50 journalists who left El Salvador in 2025 to consider this recognition as their own. In 2025, the exodus of Salvadoran journalists was the largest in Latin America, per Reporters Without Borders.
Óscar Martínez thanked Mexico for having welcomed El Faro journalists forced into exile.
“It is an honor to journey with you through these turbulent times,” he told the newspaper staff. “May the dictator and his minions understand this once and for all: silence is not an option for us. It has never been, and it never will be.”
