A team of 14 journalists coordinated by Johanna Osorio Herrera traveled for eight months to eight cities in Venezuela to denounce the situation of child malnutrition that plagues the country. The research, under the title La Generacion del Hambre, was published in El Pitazo, in collaboration with the Connectas platform. The jury, which awarded the Ortega  Gasset Prize to the best multimedia coverage, valued the perseverance of this group of young journalists.

“We put face to the humanitarian emergency in Venezuela” The magazine ‘5W’, ‘El Pitazo’, Vincent West and Dario Arizmendi, winners of the Ortega y Gasset awards.

The story tells the story of Alexander, a child whose diet is based on lentils (the only food that his parents can afford); Maria Victoria and Maria Veronica, twins who have not eaten meat for months; Juan Luis, who came to walk a mile and a half to go to the hospital while diarrhea dehydrated him; Maikel, whose weight varies continuously but does not improve his health; Dayana, who is forced to beg to eat; Valentina, who measures and weighs half of what she should; Carlos, whose family is fed thanks to donations from an NGO, and Jhender, a child who died of hunger in April 2018. Everyone has something in common: they were born in 2013, the year in which Nicolás Maduro assumed power in Venezuela.

“We wanted to publish this story through the children to humanize the figures of child malnutrition in Venezuela and because these data are essential to determine if a country is in a humanitarian emergency,” says the coordinator of the investigation from Medellin (Colombia); and remember that these data stopped being published in 2013. The report shows that the consumption of meat is increasingly reduced among children under 5 years of age -20% in a year- and that only 26% of children drink dairy products.