I want to begin these brief words by dedicating the Ortega y Gasset award that I receive today to the more than 300 Nicaraguan journalists who have been forced into exile by the new family dictatorship that oppresses my homeland. A tyranny hostile to the word, which has cut off the right to free expression in the country, where there is no longer any independent media. Sixty of those media outlets — including television stations, radio stations, newspapers, Internet portals — have been shut down, or their facilities confiscated as happened with the newspaper La prensa. Meanwhile, silence spreads over Nicaragua while the world looks elsewhere in a time of conflicts and uncertainties. Silence and oblivion.
In the final days of the Somoza family dictatorship, which also repressed free information, journalists resorted to broadcasting news from churches, where people gathered to listen. This was called “catacomb journalism” at the time. Today journalists produce information from outside the borders — in Costa Rica, Mexico, the United States, or Spain — and it reaches Nicaragua through digital platforms. It is virtual catacomb journalism, supported by a network of anonymous correspondents inside the territory, who work in secret for fear of their safety and lives.
A clandestine journalism that challenges absolute power and overcomes silence and fear, to fulfill the critical duty of informing. To those men and women who make this possible from their trenches, I pay tribute, and on behalf of all of them I receive this award that the newspaper EL PAÍS, so linked to my life, grants me on its 50th anniversary, in the most enviable company, that of two great contemporary journalists.
Svetlana Alexievich, who has made reportage a literary art of such magnitude that she deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature; and Martin Baron, an example of ethical journalism that investigates the truth thoroughly, without concessions to power. Being on this podium of honor alongside both is an award in itself.
I feel that this award, being given to me, seeks in me the columnist I have been for decades, just to remember that my first column in EL PAÍS appeared in 1985; but also the journalist I always wanted to be, between the typing of typewriters and the smoke of cigarettes in the heat of newsrooms, or a night shift reporter on duty, like my fellow countryman Rubén Darío who at twenty covered street events in Santiago de Chile as a crime reporter.
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But there is also another happy craft, that of the writer of inventions, which leads me every morning to type with the rigor of a typist and always youthful enthusiasm, in the solitude of my study, formerly in Managua, now in Madrid; it is the same fingers that move over the keys: those of one who narrates real events, and those of one who narrates lies. But one knows that if on one side imagination is more legitimate the freer it is, on the other it cannot be free unless it seeks the truth.
I can say that this is the commitment, of a lifetime, devoted to writing, under an irreducible commitment to words. In one craft or another, writer or journalist, they are the same words.
Thank you very much then for awarding my words, in their uncompromising search for freedom.
[Full speech by Sergio Ramírez, Nicaraguan writer and Cervantes Literature Prize winner at the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award 2026 ceremony]
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