• By Silvia Higuera
• November 11, 2026

For the past three decades, Venezuelan journalist Luz Mely Reyes, one of this year’s winners of the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Prize, has either worked from inside a country under an authoritarian regime or in exile. The press has been one of the biggest targets of Chavismo, with media closures and the jailing of journalists becoming an inseparable part of the legacy of Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro.

Despite the repression, Reyes, like many of her colleagues, has used journalism to fight back. In 2015, amid one of the most challenging economic crises for media in the country, Reyes and journalists Laura Weffer and Josefina Ruggiero founded the influential digital outlet Efecto Cocuyo.

By then, Reyes was already one of the most trusted voices for people seeking to understand Venezuela today. She worked for 10 years at the newspaper Últimas Noticias as political editor, investigative editor and weekend editor, until it was bought by government-friendly investors. She then became the first director of the digital outlet Diario 2001. The 2002 coup attempt against Chávez, which ultimately strengthened his grip on power, underscored for Reyes the need to produce journalism detached from ideology. That allowed her to maintain sources across the political spectrum, she said.

Delivering her acceptance speech for the Maria Moors Cabot Prize. (Photo: Courtesy)

“I understood — or that was my reading at the time — that polarization was going to do us a lot of harm, not only as a society, but to journalists, because it was going to greatly affect the exercise of journalism’s fundamental values,” Reyes told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR). “Over time, you realize it’s not neutrality, but maintaining the impartiality necessary to get as close to the truth as possible.”

Reyes’ focus on telling everyone’s stories was one of the aspects highlighted by the jury of the Cabot Prize, the oldest international journalism award, given annually by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

“What sets her work apart is not only its consistency or courage — qualities she shares with many colleagues working under adverse conditions — but something harder to define: an ability to read complex situations and capture, with precision and empathy, the human dimension of the people at their center,” the jury said of Reyes.

Resistance from exile

For years, Reyes said, she resisted the idea of having to leave Venezuela. But at some point she saw only two options: stay silent or end up in prison.

Between 2015 and 2019, Reyes and Efecto Cocuyo were the targets of stigmatization, especially by pro-government websites and by “El Mazo Dando,” a program hosted by Diosdado Cabello, currently Venezuela’s interior minister, former president of the National Assembly and one of the most powerful figures in Chavismo. In those platforms, Reyes and her outlet were often accused of spreading false information to harm Maduro’s government. According to a United Nations report, in 2021 pro-government media published 12 articles accusing Efecto Cocuyo of terrorism and of being linked to efforts to overthrow the chavista government. Reyes was also called a “traitor to the homeland” in several government-linked publications.

“I said, ‘No, I’m not going to prison,’ I don’t see the point. [...] And then I also said, ‘and I’m not going to stay silent.’ So the cost of not staying silent is often exile. And that was one of the costs I had to bear,” said Reyes, who considers herself in exile since 2023, when she realized she could not return to Venezuela after her passport was annulled and she received more prison threats.

For a time, Reyes went in and out of Venezuela to work. Since 2018, she has lived in Colombia, Brazil and the United States.

From outside her country, Reyes continued her work at Efecto Cocuyo and devoted time to better understanding the effects of exile on journalism, particularly among her Venezuelan colleagues, as well as migration to the United States and the policies of President Donald Trump.

Her essay “Te tienes que ir” (“You have to leave”) captures the experience of many Venezuelan journalists in exile. The 50-page piece includes interviews with 10 Venezuelan journalists living in exile in the United States. It describes the obstacles they have faced while trying to continue practicing journalism, details how the country’s media industry was dismantled, and offers resources to support journalists in exile. The Cabot jury highlighted the essay for reflecting on the Venezuelan dictatorship’s systematic strategy of silencing the country’s  journalists.

From exile, Reyes has also written stories that, she has said, she might not have been able to produce from her country, such as “Venezuela contra el temor” (“Venezuela Against Fear”), which received the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) award in the opinion category. “I’m very fond of it because I recount part of the suffering of political prisoners and their families,” she said.

An award for democracy

“I am going to start with the end: I come from a country that we are going to rebuild,” Reyes said in her acceptance speech for the Cabot prize. “For nearly three decades, the world watched as our democracy was dismantled; today, I call upon you to lay down, brick by brick, the pieces to raise it back up. Supporting the press that has resisted is a moral, democratic, and strategic duty.”

Rebuilding Venezuela is almost an obsession for Reyes. On many occasions, Reyes, 58, has said that she was born in Caracas in 1967 and grew up in Petare, one of the capital’s working-class neighborhoods. She grew up in poverty, she said, in a place where homes had zinc roofs and often lacked electricity, running water and other services. “I’ve always said that I grew up seeing the contrasts of the city, with the green of the Ávila [the mountain range that separates Caracas from the sea], the beauty of its sunrises, and the sound of gunfire where I lived,” Reyes said.

During her recent visit to Caracas, she spent time in Petare—the city’s largest working-class neighborhood—where she lived during her childhood. (Photo: Daniel Hernández/ Efecto Cocuyo)

When she receives prizes like the Cabot — she is also a recipient of other awards like the Gabo Award, the CPJ International Press Freedom Award, the LASA Media Award, the WOLA Human Rights Award and the Franco-German Human Rights Award — she always emphasizes one point: that her achievements, as an Afro-Venezuelan woman from a working-class neighborhood, are thanks to the public education she received. She studied journalism at the Central University of Venezuela and later earned a master’s degree in social communication at the Andrés Bello Catholic University.

Venezuela’s former democratic governments, as imperfect as they were, understood the importance of public education, Reyes said.

“The symbolism is that this is an award for democracy,” Reyes said of the Cabot.

Little has changed in Venezuela since the United States captured Nicolás Maduro in January, but it has at least allowed her to return to Caracas to visit, Reyes said.

“I can return, but I can’t stay,” she added, emphasizing that the country has not yet returned to democracy.

A real change for journalists in Venezuela, Reyes said, will require the government to repeal restrictive censorship laws, stop using taxes to harass media outlets, and lift digital blockades on all media.

Efecto Cocuyo was unblocked on Sept. 17, allowing people in the country to visit the outlet’s website. Reyes said it was a bittersweet victory since only a few outlets have been unblocked. “It’s a very common tactic in authoritarian environments: you benefit some and not others, to create division among those of us fighting for the same cause,” Reyes said.

Reyes said awards like the Cabot help bring attention back to the situation in her country.

“It lets people ask questions and take into account views that differ from the hegemonic narrative that things have been fixed in Venezuela,” she said.

Editor’s note: Rosental Alves, director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, which publishes LatAm Journalism Review (LJR), is chair of the Cabot Prize jury.

This text was translated with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera