At closing session of the 11th World Forum for Democracy, the Council of Europe announced that the winner of its 2023 Democracy Innovation Award was the Defensores de la Democracia Living Archive, the first online, public, searchable archive that preserves, catalogues and aggregates the work of journalists killed in Mexico.
The main goal of the organisation is to prevent violence against journalists in Mexico, one of the most lethal countries for reporters. Before the archive was created, the work produced by slain local journalists in Mexico was either scattered in basements across the country or was quickly disappearing. Most of the work was published by journalists who founded their own media outlet and published precariously. Some merely posted on social media, other started a blog or website and some printed and photocopied their own makeshift newspapers to offer around town. Their archive aims to preserve the work as a means to honour their legacy, while becoming a tool that can be analysed in order to identify trends to better understand patterns of violence against reporters.
