Patricia Marcano Meza
Patricia Marcano Meza
Patricia Marcano Meza is a Venezuelan investigative journalist and editor with nearly two decades of experience. She and her team at Armando.info won the 2025 Excellence Award at the Festival Gabo, one of Latin America’s most prestigious journalism events.
Her reporting focuses on corruption, money laundering, human rights abuses, and environmental crimes. At Armando.info, she led the newsroom in Caracas and coordinated the Venezuelan chapters of the FinCEN Files (2020) and the Pandora Papers (2021), contributing to major regional investigations.
Patricia has earned numerous accolades, including finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2021 with a joint ICIJ project, third place at the Latin American Investigative Journalism Award in 2024, the Roche Health Journalism Award from Fundación Gabo in 2020, and the National Award for Investigative Journalism from Ipys-Venezuela in 2018, 2019, and 2021.
She is best known for a documentary exposing how Venezuela’s leader profited from a subsidized food program to the country’s impoverished families, which included powdered milk of deplorable quality. An analysis of the milk showed that it had dangerous levels of sodium and carbohydrates and could not be classified as milk. Her team has been targeted by the government since 2017, but she remained in the country until she received a Fulbright scholarship in 2023 to pursue a master’s degree in the United States at Ohio University, focusing on data journalism.
She aims to return to Venezuela to share her expertise with local reporters and train the next generation of investigative journalists, continuing her work on accountability and transparency.
Patricia sees the AFPP Fellowship as a unique opportunity for foreign journalists forced to live in exile to learn how to practice journalism in the United States. “Not only will you learn investigative and data journalism techniques, but you will also gain valuable tips about how to integrate into a new society and culture without losing your identity as a journalist and how to be able to continue working as a journalist far from home,” she says.
