2025 Guardian Award: Marina Walker Guevara

Each year, the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) presents the Guardian Award to a journalist whose pursuit of the truth has significantly contributed to the fight against fraud. This year, the honor goes to Marina Walker Guevara, a trailblazer in collaborative investigative journalism. 

Marina Walker Guevara is executive editor at the Pulitzer Center, an organization that supports in-depth journalism globally. She also sits on the board of directors of the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) and is a co-founder of the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism (CLIP). 

Before joining the Pulitzer Center, Walker Guevara was deputy director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). She managed two of the largest collaborations of reporters in journalism history, the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, which involved hundreds of journalists using technology to unravel stories of public interest from terabytes of leaked financial data. Walker Guevara was instrumental in developing the model of large-scale media collaboration, persuading reporters who used to compete with one another instead to work together, share resources and amplify their reach and impact. 

Walker Guevara’s work as a journalist started in Argentina. Her stories on topics ranging from environmental degradation by multinational companies to the global offshore economy have appeared in leading international media, including The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Mother Jones, Le Monde and the BBC. 

Walker Guevara has won or shared more than 50 national and international awards, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. In 2018–2019, she was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University. During her fellowship, she focused on the use of artificial intelligence in big data journalistic investigations. That same year, she received the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service from her alma mater, the Missouri School of Journalism, and the Carnegie Corporation named her one of 38 "Great Immigrants, Great Americans" for her work leading global teams of investigative journalists working in the public interest. 

The ACFE is proud to recognize Marina Walker Guevara’s unwavering commitment to truth and transparency with the 2025 Guardian Award, which will be presented at the 36th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference, June 22–17, 2025.