Best reporting in any medium on Latin America
Award Year: 2025
Award Name: The Robert Spiers Benjamin Award 2025-2026
Recipient: Monte Reel
Affiliation: Bloomberg News
Honored Work: “Erasing the Verdict”
Monte Reel illustrates how a notorious drug trafficker, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, won the backing of Trump-circle insiders who reversed what had been a major strike against the kind of crime in Latin America that U.S. law enforcement had long sought to curtail.
Links to the winning work:
Erasing the Verdict: The Ongoing Shock of Trump’s Cocaine Kingpin Pardon
Citation for Excellence:
Elliott Woods
Texas Monthly, The Food and Environment Reporting Project, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project
“Inside the Deadliest Immigration-Related Disaster in U.S. History”