2025-12-16 16:00:01
The investigative stories produced in the Spanish-speaking world this year show a vibrant journalistic landscape, despite the challenges reporters now face in many places — from rampant disinformation to job insecurity, and from threats against independent reporters to declining public trust in journalism and news outlets.
Our selection takes you from an investigation into missing children caught up in an internal conflict in Ecuador to Spain, where investigative reporters examined the role of algorithms in healthcare; and from a tool that allows readers to examine the intersection of wealth and power in Peru to Paraguay, where journalists uncovered clandestine airstrips. We also feature a collaboration that uncovered the influence of big tech in Latin America and how it is shaping people’s lives.
These stories highlight the strength of the investigative journalism community, yet the risks are growing. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), journalism across the Americas is facing a crisis. This year’s World Press Freedom Index found that news outlets in the region are dealing with “persistent structural and economic challenges,” rising authoritarianism in many places, and press freedom challenges.
“As journalism’s public service role is degraded, propaganda and disinformation fill the void — threatening the region’s democracies,” the authors warned.
But investigative journalists in the region are rising to the challenge. And while it is almost impossibly hard to highlight just eight pieces for the last year that show the scale, breadth, and power of investigative reporting in the Spanish language, the stories selected here prioritized variety in content, location, and format.
Image: Screenshot, El CLIP
This nine-month investigation, covering 13 countries, goes deep into how major technology companies have been working to create a “web of influence” to shape public policy and profit from weak regulations across Latin America. The stories and data reveal the scale of lobbying and litigation by big tech companies and their allies — and how it blocks policies that could curb online harms. Led by Agência Pública (Brazil) and the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP), the investigation involved an additional 15 media outlets in a collaborative transnational effort. Together, they mapped nearly 3,000 lobbying activities targeting governments and parliaments across the region, tracing lawsuits and legislative proposals alike. The project also delves into the environmental toll of the sprawling data centers being set up across the continent. Readers can access the findings in an interactive database that weaves rigorous data with compelling storytelling.
Image: Screenshot, Aristegui
Renowned Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui and her team of investigative reporters received a huge trove of leaked data that led them to report on a covert operation at the Mexican broadcasting giant Televisa, where members of a secret division were allegedly tasked with fabricating news and destroying reputations. The leak consisted of more than five terabytes of internal communications, including videos, photos, WhatsApp messages, and scripts that reporters said showed evidence of smear campaigns orchestrated from the headquarters of the television company. The leaked information describes an internal team in Televisa’s headquarters known as “Palomar,” which was said to have the objective of manipulating public opinion with fake videos, bots, and fake social media profiles, and discrediting individuals or companies to advance Televisa’s interests. Aristegui was also one of the targets, with her name appearing nearly 300 times. The investigation earned second place in the Javier Valdez Award at COLPIN 2025, the Latin American Conference on Investigative Journalism. Televisa has not issued an official statement on the leaks or about the subsequent departure of one of its vice presidents.
Image: Screenshot, El Surtidor
This investigation reads like a journalistic chronicle, an account by the reporters of their journey to a desolate area in Paraguay where there is no phone service and there are no paved roads — but a thriving trade in narcotics.
In the past, owning a weapon in this area was necessary to defend livestock from wild animals, one local source told them. Now, they are more worried about the drug traffickers.
Reporters for El Surtidor and OCCRP describe how Paraguay’s Chaco region has become a major hub for international drug trafficking, with clandestine airstrips used to move cocaine from Bolivia to Brazil, Paraguay, and beyond. Despite government interventions, these tracks are rebuilt or replaced, showing failures in enforcement. The Chaco’s remoteness, harsh terrain, and lack of radar coverage make it ideal for criminal operations, while local communities, including Indigenous groups and Mennonites, are caught between illegal activity and violence.
Image: Screenshot, Armando.info
The border region between Colombia and Venezuela has long been porous, complicated, and dangerous. But this investigation explores the dangers of the crossing, and the crisis of missing people who have disappeared in the segment of the border region extending from La Guajira to the Arauca River. Reporters from Armando.info and Vorágine visited several hotspots on both sides of the border, where they confirmed the crisis of the missing. They portray an expanding and largely unspoken situation in areas dominated by criminal networks from both nations and along uncontrolled smuggling corridors. The piece highlights that while Colombian authorities have attempted to document and search for some of the disappeared, Venezuela’s government has responded with indifference, leaving families without answers. See Cartography of Horror, an illustrated story from the investigation.
Peru: Street Wayki
Image: Screenshot, Ojo Público
In an effort to document the wealth of Peru’s leading politicians, investigative reporters from Ojo Público created Street Wayki — a game-like application that is also a valuable resource for journalists tracking money flows, conflicts of interest, and power networks across Peru’s political system. The platform allows users to compare the wealth of the president, members of Congress, and the country’s regional governors, revealing, for instance, how top authorities have significantly increased their assets while in office. It also highlights cases of lawmakers who reported no assets as candidates but now declare holdings worth hundreds of thousands of soles, detailed alongside any complaints, investigations, and judicial processes they currently face. The application was developed by a multidisciplinary team made up of journalists, developers and data analysts, who built the databases through requests for access to information, data extraction from public portals via scrapping, and access to tax and judicial files.
Image: Screenshot, Connectas
Soldiers accused of forcibly removing teenagers from their homes. Mothers looking for their lost children. Drug gangs forcibly recruiting. Investigations going nowhere.
In this report, journalists from CONNECTAS reveal how the wave of violence rocking Ecuador has had a devastating impact on the country’s children — with disappearances among minors nearly doubling between 2023 and 2024, and an average of three children going missing each day in early 2025. The investigation highlights that criminal organizations, including gangs and cartels, are recruiting children, who suffer violence and sexual exploitation. The report also alleges that the State’s security forces are also implicated in a number of forced disappearances — amid allegations of abuse of power linked to the state of emergency (The country’s minister for human rights did not respond to the allegations set out in the piece). The investigation combines data with personal testimonies and shows patterns of forced recruitment, gendered exploitation, and inadequate enforcement of laws to protect minors.
Image: Screenshot, Civo
In Spain, about 9,400 melanoma cases are expected to be diagnosed this year. This fast-spreading cancer can metastasize within months, and once it does, outcomes are often poor, so making detection mistakes is potentially deadly. This investigation by the Spanish data journalism outlet Civio explores the risks of privatized AI in medicine and the broader ethical implications of biased datasets. It uncovers discrepancies between marketing claims, independent clinical results, and the actual implementation of a tool that could affect thousands of patients. The story follows one particular AI algorithm being implemented in the Basque region to screen for melanoma skin cancer. Despite a €1.6 million (US$1.8 million) public investment, studies show the tool misses one in three melanomas and misidentifies benign moles as cancerous in roughly 20% of cases. The algorithm was also trained only on white patients, raising concerns about its efficacy for people with darker skin.
Image: Screenshot, CIPER
Violence against the little boy started before he turned one month old. He arrived in the hospital with rib fractures and fluid in the lungs. He was admitted to a children’s home and separated from his parents, but three years later, having been returned to the care of his family, he died — his case apparently that of another young victim of domestic abuse.
This investigation by CIPER exposes systemic failures in Chile’s child protection system, showing how children have been placed in the care of adults accused, investigated, or convicted of abuse and maltreatment. It exposes conflicts of interest, poor monitoring, and failures to act on warning signs. Using judicial cases, the reporting reconstructs the stories of children who suffered abuse while supposedly protected by the state. The investigation highlights repeated judicial errors, inadequate oversight by family courts, and inconsistencies in intervention programs, revealing how the best interests of the child are often ignored.
Andrea Arzaba is GIJN’s Spanish editor and also serves as director for its Digital Threats project. She holds a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and a BA in Communications and Journalism from Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Her work has appeared in Palabra, Proceso Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, Animal Politico, and 100 Reporters, among other media outlets.
2025-12-15 16:00:27
Reflecting a year in which both kleptocracy and attacks on independent media have increased worldwide, investigative reporters harnessed collaboration, courage, traditional reporting, and a mix of new and established digital tools to hold bad actors accountable.
Many complex investigations gather leads and data through a blend of custom and open source tools. One example from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) this year was how their team partnered with experts to create a machine learning-based detection tool, and used this with its open source Datashare platform to automatically identify passport information from millions of leaked records.
But GIJN’s annual Top Tools lists seek to highlight innovative, individual tools that don’t require advanced computer science skills and address topical needs.
Last year, the list featured a master toolkit from Bellingcat that updates reporters on the status of open source tools; a remarkable new portal that reveals munition types from fragments found near bomb craters; and a tool that can spare reporters from having to trawl through bigoted far-right content by automatically pulling data from fringe social media platforms.
For 2025, we highlight some new or underused tools that aren’t necessarily the most powerful in their sector, but that focus on real-world problems investigative reporters encounter on their beats. For instance: one tool solves a time problem facing under-staffed newsrooms that otherwise lack the bandwidth to manually trawl through recorded hours of public meetings or other media. Another allows reporters to dig into a specific environmental blind spot: the harms associated with digging up minerals in the Global South to equip the green energy products that Western consumers and shareholders might imagine to be wholly good. And a third unearths the regulatory fines quietly accumulated by big corporations around the world — including those caused by misconduct by their subsidiaries.
Investigative journalists have made huge progress in exposing labor and environmental abuses by the fossil fuel and palm oil industries. But far less scrutiny has been given to the extractive industries providing the resources for the West’s alternative energy sector — including solar panels, electric car batteries, and other green components. Bloomberg’s supply chain investigation that linked much of the aluminium in a major US electric vehicle model to illness and land grabs in the Amazon is a great example.
At the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference in the US this year, investigative journalists revealed that some of the most powerful — and least used — tools for digging into these contracts, supply chains, and local harms are resources developed and used by civil society groups.
Chief among these is the IDI Follow The Money Toolkit: a treasure trove of free tools and databases from the human rights NGO Inclusive Development International, which lets reporters dig into every aspect of corporate harm in the Global South, and features open source research tools, corporate registries, and even pension fund disclosures. Databases range from Land Matrix — a dataset of global land deals — to the Chinese Loans to Africa Database as well as the GIJN Resource Center.
Snapshot of the resources listed in the Inclusive Development International’s Follow the Money Toolkit. Image: Screenshot
A wealth of leads, potential investigative sources, and newsworthy remarks can be found within the hours-long public events —parliamentary hearings, regulatory agency meetings, podcasts, or live events — that are now routinely uploaded to YouTube and government websites. But few newsrooms have the staff resources to listen to or analyze this long-form material.
Veteran journalists at the NICAR25 data journalism summit in the US this year revealed that one free, AI-powered tool — summarize.tech — offers a remarkably simple time-saving coverage solution. Reporters can simply paste the video URL into its search bar, hit “submit,” and wait a few seconds to find a detailed and fairly reliable summary of the discussion, broken into five-minute increments. But the tool also enables journalism-level reliability by embedding timeline links, so reporters can click on those links to directly hear the newsworthy discussion moment highlighted in the summary. You can also view transcriptions of meetings already created by other users. Two caveats: The service only allows five free uploads per month, and is less accurate in foreign languages.
“I uploaded a video of a school board meeting of about an hour-and-a-half, and it took about 10 seconds to generate this great summary of what happened,” explained Cynthia Tu, a data reporter at Sahan Journal. “The downside of this tool is that summaries for videos that are not in English are not as reliable. But I think it’s a great tool.”
Powerful digital tools are required to detect AI-generated content because traditional fact-checking simply takes much more time than the minutes required to create new AI misinformation.
Meanwhile, digital search expert Henk van Ess warns that, thanks to dramatic improvements in generative AI models, “a journalist trained on 2023 detection methods might develop false confidence, declaring obvious AI content as authentic simply because it passes outdated tests.” The “arms race” between AI tool creators and AI detectors remains tilted in favor of the creators, which means a combination of trustworthy tools, vigilance, updated verification techniques, and traditional reporting is required to identify the deepfakes and track the actors behind them.
This year, Van Ess produced a timely GIJN guide on how to quickly identify AI-generated material, featuring seven categories of detection for deepfakes. These include techniques for recognizing “too good to be true” red flags; geometric violations; pixel analysis; audio artifacts; context failures; and behavior pattern problems.
There are many useful detection tools and techniques available to reporters, and GIJN described many of those that dig into audio deepfakes in a popular 2024 feature. But many of the major tools suffer from overconfidence. In response, Van Ess developed an innovative open source tool, called Image Whisperer, released this year. Notably, the tool utilizes Google Vision processing and large language model analysis in parallel and is designed not to guess, instead alerting reporters and researchers when it doesn’t find a good result. “It’s not trying to be the best system out there — it’s trying to be the most honest,” noted Van Ess.
Image: Screenshot, Violation Tracker Global
Corporations routinely, and quietly, pay regulatory fines for environmental, financial, or labor abuses without the public noticing, or have patterns of misconduct that can be hard to quantify. Sometimes, multinational or billionaire-controlled companies will claim virtuous records, while, in fact, they should be held accountable for systemic wrongdoing by their little-known subsidiaries.
Fortunately, several free tools now track and aggregate penalties for corporate misconduct in an ever-growing total of 60 countries around the world, offering investigative reporters both authoritative details and abuse patterns at a glance, and easy ways to poke holes in greenwashing or public relations-polished claims about good governance.
Developed by the Corporate Research Project at the US-based NGO Good Jobs First, the flagship Violation Tracker database now includes 684,000 penalties and settlements involving 450 federal and state regulatory agencies in the United States, going back to 2000. These range from wage theft to anti-competitive practices and illegal polluting activities, and are often relevant to both domestic and international investigations due to the large number of multinational firms operating in the US. The project also features an almost-as-detailed database for the United Kingdom — Violation Tracker UK — featuring 117,000 cases resolved by 80 agencies since 2010.
In an exciting additional resource for global journalists, the same project has just launched a much broader Violation Tracker Global portal, which offers less comprehensive but nonetheless unique and valuable data on corporate misconduct from 58 additional countries and territories. Much of this data is painstakingly gathered from local agency press releases, and with the help of tools such as LexisNexis and Google Translate. Remarkably, the data is checked and entered manually by the project team.
Reporters can also search or cross-check corporate misconduct data on some countries via other resources, such as the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre and the Corporate Prosecution Registry.
In response to the absence of centralized data for rights abuses facing Africa’s 41 million migrants, an independent media organization, Diaspora Africa, has launched a small but innovative data platform that graphically displays the myriad violations these communities face.
The Migration Monitor includes interactive maps identifying major incidents of labor exploitation and human rights abuses within destination countries, and includes data going back to 2016. Gathered through painstaking manual research, its highlights include everything from lethal border guard attacks to systemic sexual abuse and corporate labor exploitation.
The included incidents are far from comprehensive, but its database is growing, and the dashboard offers useful geographic context for the exploitation trends between regions.
A screenshot of some major abuse events facing African diaspora communities in 2023. Image: Screenshot, Migration Monitor
At IRE this year, Maria Georgieva, an award-winning freelance investigative journalist and former Russia correspondent, shared a wide array of databases useful for digging into oligarchs and emerging kleptocrats in Russia and Europe.
Georgieva warned that new oligarchs are being created all the time, as authoritarianism grows around the world and new corrupt relationships with rich allies emerge. Their interests are also diversifying far beyond the traditional energy sector, and now range from media and transport to tech and public construction.
Georgieva said the following tools and databases are useful for tracking emerging oligarchs and their enablers.
Rowan Philp is GIJN’s global reporter and impact editor for GIJN. Rowan was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.
2025-12-12 16:14:06
Archives offer journalists new muckraking avenues and stories, from revealing how the US government broke promises made to freed slaves in the 19th century to uncovering crimes against humanity in Syria and Brazil.
During the “Digging into Archives — Historical Investigations” panel at the 14th Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Juliana Dal Piva, columnist and investigative reporter from the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP) and ICL Noticias, Hadi al Khatib, managing director of Mnemonic, Jennifer LaFleur, data journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and moderator Tristan Ahtone, editor-at-large of Grist, shared how to create and use archives to strengthen journalistic research and legal accountability by wrongdoers.
When describing Mnemonic, a digital archive created to investigate international crimes, Hadi al-Khatib explained some of the decisions archivists make.
“We started this work ten years ago because most of the information we collected was posted on social media platforms, and it was being erased because of the algorithms these platforms used,” he said, highlighting how vital information, such as proof of attacks on hospitals during the Syrian civil war, needed to be saved.
Clips that proved international crimes were committed were being deleted by platforms such as YouTube for its “graphic or explicit content” to comply with the algorithm’s standards. Thanks to its team and sources, Mnemonic has archived more than 30 million records and 400 terabytes of information from over 100,000 sources.
As both an online archive and an investigative team, Mnemonic conducts essential work to find out what happened to people disappeared by the authorities after being detained in checkpoints and roadblocks set up by the Syrian army during the early years of the war.
Everything stored in the archive aims to meet the extremely high bar that courts demand for accepting videos, photographs, recordings, and documents that aren’t original. They’ve also designed software to prove that these items haven’t been altered. Mnemonic archivists also transcribe audio from video using machine learning software to enable keyword searches.
Some lessons learned from Mnemonic’s work are:
Jennifer LaFleur explains how they scoured the archives for material for their investigation into historic injustices and slavery. Image: Alyaa Alhadjri for GIJN
Ultimately, an archive’s potential is realized when a researcher uses it to tell a story that uncovers wrongdoing relevant to present-day readers or viewers. LaFleur and her team from the Center for Public Integrity and Reveal proved in the “40 Acres and a Lie” podcast and multimedia platform that, after slavery was abolished in the United States, the federal government rescinded a Special Field Order from 1865 to give each freed slave family up to 40 acres of confiscated land.
This act set off a chain of injustice against African Americans linked to contemporary structural inequalities and racism that was laid bare when the researchers interviewed the descendants of African Americans who received land that was later taken away.
“We spent a lot of time in archives and museums and historical centres trying to get records to fill in all the blanks,” said La Fleur. She added that her team also built a tool to enable other researchers to search documents in one of their main sources, the Freedmen’s Bureau — established by US Congress in the 19th century to help former slaves transition to freedom and which contains names and information for hundreds of thousands of people.
Dal Piva, in her book “Crime Without Punishment: How the Military Killed Rubens Paiva,” examines how Brazilian congressman Ruben Paiva — who in 1971 was taken by armed men who claimed to be members of the Brazilian Armed Forces — was murdered by a former military member, and details what happened to him while he was “disappeared.”
Paiva’s kidnapping, torture, and killing are painstakingly described — illuminating aspects of a past with which Brazil hasn’t fully grappled. “There’s so much about the dictatorship that hasn’t been done,” said Dal Piva. “It’s even difficult for us to do stories on this, because there’s a culture of silence.”
Both investigators highlighted how they approached the archives to tell a story. La Fleur’s team grounded the archive’s findings in storytelling by later finding and interviewing the descendants of former slaves. Dal Piva — who used judicial archives and court records to help uncover what happened to congressman Paiva — tapped into storytelling techniques to narrate the twists, turns, and surprises that come up when uncovering new documents in an archive.
The main tips they shared to approach archival research are:
Dal Piva suggested getting to know the archive almost like you would a friend. Indeed, more than a passive information vault, archives are architectures of information moulded by people and institutions through choices. Be familiar with them and also let them surprise you: They might hold the key to stories others gave up on uncovering long ago.
2025-12-11 21:48:42
The Sentry is seeking an experienced and dynamic EU Senior Policy Advisor to lead the organization’s strategic engagement with the European Union and its Member States on a range of policy matters related to illicit finance, corruption, human rights, conflict, and related investigations conducted by The Sentry. This role will play an important part in The Sentry’s effort to support the EU in leading the global fight against corruption and illicit finance by providing information, analysis and policy recommendations.
The EU Senior Policy Advisor will engage with European policy makers in Brussels, including EU institutions and members states; in EU capitals with member state government officials; in program countries with EU delegations and embassy employees; and with the private sector, including EU banks and other private sector stakeholders that have the power to halt illicit financial flows, block transactions, and freeze assets. The role includes organizing in-person and online briefings, bilateral meetings, and roundtables; engaging in public-private partnerships related to our country programs and thematic priorities; and publishing policy papers including op-eds.
This position calls for a mission-driven, highly strategic critical thinker who thrives in a fast-paced environment, is versed in a range of policy options, and is skilled at strategic advocacy with a broad group of government, multilateral bodies, private entities, and civil society groups.
2025-12-11 20:37:02
Mnemonic works at the intersection of archiving of open source information and leveraging that preserved content as evidence, for accountability. Our legal work involves building digital evidence archives, litigation support, and open source investigations into international crimes and human rights violations.
Legal & Research is a cross-functional programme at Mnemonic: it fills an essential coordination role, aiming to connect the dots on research methods and activities across all Mnemonic programmes and ensure good compliance with open source research and evidence standards. More specifically, Mnemonic’s legal team endeavours to secure the evidentiary potential of the open source archives and support all Mnemonic programmes in their efforts to leverage the archived material to advance justice and accountability for serious harms including human rights violations and international crimes. Mnemonic legal contributes to legal projects or potential legal projects such as case-building work, requests for information, and any other activities involving legal systems or analysis.
As a Legal Advisor for Mnemonic you will provide technical legal support to all research teams and programmes: Syrian Archive, Yemeni Archive, Sudanese Archive, Ukrainian Archive, Rapid Response, and our Technical Team. Your input might include advice on legal interventions, detailed review of research outputs, feedback on the design and implementation of new research tools or methods, and more.
Our team is small but impactful, meaning this role entails both groundbreaking advancements in international legal practice and essential-but-mundane system maintenance responsibilities. You will help to brainstorm innovative ways of leveraging digital open source evidence for accountability, and you will also meticulously check all legal outputs for basic typos and formatting issues. You will be involved in building cases for creative and strategic impact – sometimes by formatting dozens of footnotes under tight deadlines. We are looking for a new team member who is fully on board for all that this working spectrum entails, and who recognises that these types of jobs can often involve more time on the daily grind than the cutting edge.
