javier garza

Member, Interim Board of Trustees

Javier Garza is a journalist based in Torreón, México, who specializes in security and protection protocols and trainings for newsrooms and individual journalists.

He has extensive experience covering violence and organized crime. From 2006 to 2013 he and was editorial director of El Siglo de Torreón, one of the most important newspapers in Northern Mexico.

In the face of violence by organized crime, he developed safety protocols for reporters and editors which later became a model in other newsrooms in Mexico and Latin America. 

He was a 2014 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists, developing digital security trainings.

He is a Safety Advisor for the World Association of Newspapers and serves on the boards of international organizations dedicated to press freedom, such as Article19, the World Editors Forum and the Internet Freedom Festival.

He has a bachelor’s degree from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and a master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin.