Carmen Valeria Escobar

Carmen Valeria Escobar Castillo  is a journalist from El Salvador. She began her career at the online media outlet El Faro, working for its legislative observatory called Poderes. Her articles appear in national and international media such as AJ+ (Aljazeera), Washington Post Opinión,  El País and Cosecha Roja in Argentina; Pikara Magazine and elDiario.es in Spain; Divergentes, Distintas Latitudes in Mexico and Vice Latin America. In 2019, she was part of the founding team of Gatoencerrado magazine, where she led the fact-checking editorial team. She was also a professor at the Central American University José Simeón Cañas (UCA).

During the Corona pandemic, she exposed the Bukele government's lack of a health strategy as well as the dissemination of false data on water resources, corruption and embezzlement in the Ministry of Health. With the Gatoencerrado team she proposed a verification chatbot and with this idea she won the Google Innovation Project 2021. Moreover, Escobar is a fellow of the International Women Media Foundation, was included in the Women to Watch list for 2021 and is among the top 10 journalists under 30 in the Thomson Foundation's Young Journalist Award.

As a fellow of the Berlin Scholarship Program she is looking forward to learning how to better protect herself from digital threats.