ECA Alumni Engagement Grant Recipients 2022

This year, ICFJ has awarded small grants to three media project proposals presented by former Latin American Fellows. This fund is part of the ECA Alumni Engagement grant and it is only open to alumni of the "A Digital Path to Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Latin America" program. For the next three months, these grant recipients will continue to share and develop new ideas, products and methods that have great potential to advance innovation and prosperity in the Latin American media field.

Claudia Jardim

Country: Brazil

Twitter: @clajardim

Claudia is a multimedia journalist and documentary maker with more than 15 years of experience in print, broadcasting, video-making and podcasting, focusing on human rights. Born in Brazil, she lived for a decade in Venezuela covering the intense years of Hugo Chávez and the aftermath of his death. She also travelled across Latin America, reporting on social and political stories for BBC Brasil, BBC News, Deutsche Welle, CBN Radio, and others. Claudia covered the 2009 coup in Honduras as well as the political turmoil in Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico, and Colombia. Since 2015, she has been based in Thailand, working across Southeast Asia, where she now focuses on migration, modern slavery, and human trafficking. In 2017, she won a grant from the European Journalism Centre to conduct a cross-border multimedia project on women’s football and gender inequality. Jardim led the team’s audio and video storytelling coverage, coordinating production efforts in Brazil, The Gambia, Denmark, and the USA. In 2021, Jardim was a member of the jury of the Gabriel García Márquez Prize, the most important recognition for journalism in Spanish and Portuguese. Also in 2021, she received the ICFJ's A Digital Path to Entrepreneurship and Innovation for Latin America fellowship where she started to develop a narrative podcast, No Labirinto (In the Labyrinth), about modern slavery. Her latest work, an audio documentary on modern slavery in Brazil, was broadcast in February 2022 on Radio Ambulante, NPR’s Spanish-language podcast. Jardim holds an MA in Latin America history and a diploma in journalism.

Mario Roberto Cerna Palacios

Country: Honduras

Twitter:  @Mario_Cerna

Mario is a journalist with 20 years of experience in media, strategic communication, and research. He worked for El Heraldo Newspaper for 13 years. In 2005 the Inter American Press Association awarded him an honorable mention. He has a master’s degree in International Affairs (UNICAH, 2009), and a specialization in Digital Journalism (Intajour, Berlín, 2013). He is also a ICFJ Profellow (2015). He worked as researcher for Insight Crime during various investigations: Extortion and Gangsin Honduras (2015) and Firearms and trafficking in Honduras (2017). From 2017 to 2018, he was a researcher at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at the American University, where he participated in the project, "Research and analysis in support of the Mission against Corruption and Impunity in Honduras (MACCIH)". During 2019, he worked on the investigation, “Impact of the new Firearms Law in Honduras”, lead by Mark Ungar. In 2021, he participated in the investigation, “Study on Extortion in the Northern Triangle”, led by the Latin America and the Caribbean Learning and Response (LACLEARN). He was a trainer at Internews from 2016 to 2017, training journalists for the project, "Data and Investigative Journalism in the Northern Triangle". Since 2019, he lectures on investigative journalism, data journalism, and digital journalism at UNAH and UNITEC universities. In July 2021, Mario and Natalie Acosta launched the Observatory of Disinformation in Honduras: Honduras Verifica, a citizen platform to identify and denounce disinformation on social media. Currently, he leads two ongoing studies on disinformation and online violence against journalists in Honduras.

Tatiana Cristina Velasquez Archibold

Country: Colombia

Twitter: @tatta25

Tatiana is the co-founder and reporter for La Contratopedia Caribe. She is a social communicator and journalist, who graduated from the Universidad Autónoma del Caribe in Barranquilla. She earned a master's degree in Investigative Journalism, Data and Visualization from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos of Spain with a fellowship from Google. She has worked in several Colombian media outlets, including El Heraldo, El Tiempo, and La Silla Vacía, and has also published articles in El Espectador, El Confidencial de España, Vice Latino América, and Colombia Check. She has done content management for the Gabo Foundation and was a professor at the Sergio Arboleda University in Santa Marta and at the Universidad Tecnológica de Bolívar in Cartagena.

This is a program of the U.S. Department of State with funding provided by the U.S. Government and administered by ICFJ: