Víctor Peña

Víctor Peña (El Salvador, 1983) studied Plastic Arts at the University of El Salvador and Audiovisual Production at the School of Communications Mónica Herrera of El Salvador. He is a photojournalist with 12 years of experience, and he began his professional career in 2007, in La Prensa Gráfica, one of the two most printed and distributed papers in El Salvador. He worked for nine years in the Photography Department, where he developed several photographic and audiovisual reports about culture, entertainment, economics, politics and the environment.

In addition to his extensive work on social violence caused by gangs in El Salvador; Víctor also worked in showing extrajudicial executions committed by police officers and the army; inequality in the justice system and problems in the most remote rural areas in the country. With his reports, he has showed a series of problems that occur daily in this country, considered one of the most homicidal in the world. Peña also performed sports coverage focused on both National Soccer and Beach Soccer Teams from El Salvador, in Central America, Mexico, USA and the Caribbean, including reporting from the World Beach Soccer Cup held in Tahiti, in September 2013.

In January 2016 he moved to El Faro, the first digital newspaper established in Latin America, founded in 1998. That same year he was part of El Faro’s team that won the “Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Excellence Prize”, a prestigious prize for journalism in Latin America and Spain. As a photojournalist he contributes photography, audiovisual production and graphic material to all the areas of coverage El Faro addresses: politics, transparency, inequality, impunity and historical cases from El Salvador’s War, violence, normalization of violence in daily life, organized crime, gangs, culture and society &migration.

Personally, he is interested in addressing the problems currently faced by women in their country – such as inequality, pollution, the environment and migration. His work has been published in ElDiario.Es and Revista 21 (Spain), Univision.com, and he is a contributor of the Reuters News Agency.

Víctor Peña was selected for the 2018 European Press Prize shortlist with ‘Enslaved Land‘