Carlos Dada's speech: "Journalism has to position itself in the face of power. Always"

• Ece Temelkuran "We can't fight our fears, but make friends with them"
• Joaquín Manso: "In this context, journalism is the voice that challenges official narratives and exposes the authentic truth"

I am thrilled to be in Madrid today in this wonderful museum, among masterpieces and good friendships, temporarily isolated from the convulsions that our planet is going through. I would like to communicate some ideas at this time and in this place, but time is short. I warn you that I will abuse this privileged space to state some obvious.

But let me start by telling you a story, which is a very Latin American tradition of explaining things to us with a little humor.

Suppose that, aboard a fragile boat on the high seas, three Salvadoran migrants and a Cuban migrant are about to be shipwrecked. The boatman, a Mexican, tells them: "We're sinking. We have to leave someone here or we'll all die." The migrants protest but the boatman remains firm: "Either one stays or we all die. You decide who we leave." The three Salvadorans look at each other and then look at the Cuban. One of the Salvadorans told him: "You wanted democracy, didn't you? Let's vote!"

XXI EL MUNDO Journalism Awards

Carlos Dada.

"Journalism is not a profession for heroes, or at least it shouldn't be"

• Written by: SARA POLO Madrid
• Written by: PHOTOGRAPHY: ALBERTO DI LOLLI

"Journalism is not a profession for heroes, or at least it shouldn't be"

Prize-giving.

"Trust in democratic society is degraded when lies prevail"

• Written by: ESTHER MUCIENTES Madrid

"Trust in democratic society is degraded when lies prevail"

The story works because it ridicules a common concept. Democracy is the rule of the majority. We are told it in schools and in the corridors of palaces in Europe and America: democracy is the rule of the majority.

Three Salvadorans are in the majority; A Cuban is a minority. Democratically abandoned to its fate on the high seas. Three votes to one.

I come from the country that now has the most popular president in Latin America. Nayib Bukele, according to polls, has 85% popular approval and has become the main reference point for the new Latin American populism. With popular support as the main argument against his critics, Bukele is heading towards a re-election prohibited by our Constitution. It controls the three branches of government, thanks to a technical blow to the judiciary. It controls the army and the police. It controls all the institutions of the state.

Bukele will be re-elected next February despite the fact that six articles of our Constitution prohibit re-election. There is no authority or institution capable of restraining their will. To impose limits on their power. Once again, we are witnessing the birth of a dictatorship. A dictatorship that came to power through democratic means, something that is increasingly common in today's world. An existential challenge to liberal democracies.

As a good dictator, Bukele does not tolerate criticism. It builds a univocal state in which there is no room for plurality of voices, nor for the ideas of others, nor for opposition political projects, nor for civil society organizations that defend citizens' rights and human rights. There is no room for journalism either. Just propaganda.

It's up to journalism to take a stand against power. Always. Questioning the powerful's use of their ability to affect the lives of others. Journalism in regions like mine is frustrating because we rarely find among the powerful a real will to positively transform the lives of others. What we often find are projects of concentration of power and enrichment at the expense of corruption and exploitation of others

In El Salvador we have been living under a state of emergency for 20 months now, 100,000 people have been detained without a court order and without the right to see their families or lawyers. El Salvador is today the country with the highest rate of prisoners in the world.

Since its inception we have found testimonies from survivors of Bukele's prisons. Innocent men, women and young people whose lives have been forever marked, subjected to torture, humiliation, to witness the death of other prisoners by the beatings of uniformed men who today have official license to give free rein to their worst impulses. The pretext is the war on gangs. According to human rights advocates, not even a third of those 100,000 detainees are linked to gangs. In other words, at least 70,000 innocent people are rotting today in Bukele's prisons without the right to defend themselves, subjected to systematic torture and without their families knowing where they are.

Lies and torture are not liberating, just or democratic forces. Even if they are applauded by the majority of the population.

Convinced by the false arguments of popular support, European and North American representatives in San Salvador legitimize their exercise of power and their aspirations to perpetrate themselves in it. "It's what the majority of Salvadorans want," some diplomats say publicly and privately. "That's what democracy is."

And this is the truism that seems necessary to remember and repeat: democracy is not the rule of the majority, but a system of checks and balances, of limits to power, which guarantee rights for all citizens, including, and above all, minorities. Democracy necessarily requires limits on power and the rule of law.

From there, we, the citizens, choose a proposal for government, for the administration of our public affairs with an independent and professional justice apparatus. Those of us who voted for an offer that did not reach a majority are guaranteed our rights and freedoms.

In a true democracy, the Cuban migrant in the joke would have the right to demand a different option to settle the matter, in which he would have the same rights as the three Salvadorans.

El Faro, the newspaper that I have the honor of directing, has made the decision not to give in to the government's threats and harassment against us. We will neither self-censor nor stop publishing the government's agreements with criminal organizations, nor the looting of the state, nor the birth of the dictatorship. Nor how all this affects the lives of the inhabitants of our region of the world.

That is our responsibility and our commitment to this profession. But we must maintain our editorial standards and not give in to temptations to debase public discourse. That is what this moment demands from journalism: the search for the truth and the rigorous application of the journalistic method, the defense of the plurality of voices and the free and honest exchange of arguments. And we will continue to do that as long as we remain determined to continue to dedicate ourselves to journalism.

I want to dedicate this award to my colleagues in Central America, a region where harassment of the press has become widespread today. I recognize their courage and I recognize their commitment. And today I also want to remember my colleagues who fell last month in Gaza: 37 Palestinian journalists, four Israelis and one Lebanese have been killed so far. To them, and to those Palestinian colleagues to whom it is now their turn to report the death of their friends and relatives or the bombing of their homes, I dedicate this award to them. Thanks a lot.

Carlos Dada is the founder and director of the Salvadoran newspaper El Faro, the first digital newspaper in Latin America, and winner of the International Journalism Award from EL MUNDO

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