CNN en Español Wins Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award.

The Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards has announced it is honoring CNN en Español with a 2003 Silver Baton Award for outstanding investigative reporting in “Jorge Gestoso Investiga: La Doble Desaparecida” (Jorge Gestoso Investigates: The Twice Disappeared). The honor marks the first time a non-English language program has received the duPont-Columbia Award. Selected from nearly 600 entries, the long-form documentary by CNN en Español senior anchor Jorge Gestoso and CNN en Español news editor Dario Klein, is one of 13 honored with the Silver Baton Award. The ceremony is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2003, at Columbia University in New York.

“This groundbreaking achievement, along with CNN en Español’s exclusive interview with Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez just last week, reaffirms the News Group’s commitment to reporting excellence and demonstrates that CNN en Español is the leader in delivering news to the Spanish audience throughout Latin America and beyond,” said Walter Isaacson, chairman and CEO of the CNN News Group. “Viewers throughout the hemisphere have come to rely on this network for independent, balanced and enterprising journalism, and we are extremely proud of CNN en Español for an honor well deserved.”

“La Doble Desaparecida” examines the infamous Argentine “Dirty War” of the 1970s, in which the military dictatorship was accused of kidnapping and killing thousands of the country’s citizens, secretly disposing of their bodies so that they ominously became known as “the disappeared.” Mr. Gestoso and his team uncovered never-before-seen documents and interviews, illuminating how and why the people disappeared.

The documentary further explores the impact of the acts and centers on the case of an Argentine woman who disappeared multiple times. First imprisoned, tortured and thrown from an airplane into the Río de la Plata, the woman was later found dead on the Uruguay coast by a group of fishermen only to disappear again hours later. Jorge Gestoso traveled to Argentina, Holland, Paraguay and Uruguay, to reunite most of the living protagonists of the story, including the fishermen who rescued the body from the Río de la Plata, the woman’s family, her friends and the judge who oversaw the case in Uruguay.

The awards honoring excellence in broadcast journalism were established in 1942 by the late Jessie Ball duPont in memory of her husband, Alfred I. duPont. The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism has administered the awards for the past 28 years.