In a year marked by both celebration and tension across North America, two stories—one of journalistic achievement and another of international diplomacy—have captured the spotlight. On October 8, 2025, Columbia University in New York will honor four women with the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Prizes, including Mexican journalist Isabella Cota, whose work has illuminated the hidden forces shaping ordinary lives. Meanwhile, just days earlier, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum met in Mexico City, pledging to deepen trade ties in the face of mounting US tariff threats and the looming review of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
The intersection of these events reveals a region grappling with economic uncertainty, shifting alliances, and the enduring power of investigative journalism to hold the powerful to account. For Cota, the only woman in many boardrooms during her career, the recognition comes as both a personal triumph and a testament to the growing influence of women in fields long dominated by men.
“Powerful men hate being questioned by women. You have to learn to withstand the tension and endure the discomfort,” Cota told LatAm Journalism Review. “You learn. It’s like a muscle, you work it and with practice it affects you less and makes you a better journalist.”
This year marks only the second time in the 86-year history of the Cabot Prizes that all four winners are women. Alongside Cota, the honorees are Nora Gámez Torres of the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald; Omaya Sosa Pascual of the Center for Investigative Journalism in Puerto Rico; and Natalia Viana of Brazil’s Agência Pública. For Cota, sharing the stage with these peers is a career milestone. “To be in this same league with these other three women is a tremendous honor for me,” she said. “The winners of this award have been the journalists I have admired most in my career, so reaching this position filled me with disbelief.”
The Cabot Prizes, administered by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, honor journalists and organizations from the United States and Latin America for professional excellence and coverage that promotes inter-American understanding. Cota’s reporting has consistently focused on how the financial decisions of governments and elites ripple through the lives of ordinary citizens—a perspective the Cabot Jury praised as “especially valuable amid the drastic changes in economic policies that are transforming the Americas.”
Her journey into financial journalism began unexpectedly. In September 2008, as she started her master’s degree in Journalism and Globalization in Europe, the collapse of Lehman Brothers signaled the start of a global financial crisis. “It was really such a drastic change that I paused and said, ‘The world in which I chose the most philosophical, most academic specialization is no longer going to exist.’ I realized it very quickly,” she recalled. This realization prompted her to switch to financial and business journalism at City University in London, a decision that would shape her professional path.
Since then, Cota has reported for Reuters, Bloomberg, and El País, covering economic issues across Latin America. Her reporting has sought to break down complex financial matters for general audiences, a mission she sees as essential. “When you put economic journalism in a separate drawer, you are excluding a lot of people from the knowledge you generate. What I like is showing citizens how the business interests of a handful of actors define a large part of their daily lives,” she explained. “This can be in the form of corruption, abusive monopolistic practices, or invisible financing of civil organizations, for example.”
In 2024, Cota published her first book, Luck or Disaster: Chance as Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Economic Model, using data and anecdotes to dissect the economic policies of Mexico’s former president. That same year, she joined the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a reporter and Latin America coordinator—a role she calls her “graduation” after nearly two decades in the field. The ICIJ, known for global investigations like the Panama Papers and Pandora Papers, has given Cota a platform to expand her work exposing cross-border corruption and abuses of power. “It is a challenge to simplify without sacrificing, and doing it at the level we do at ICIJ has also been very important to me. I have developed it even more.”
Among her notable investigations is “The Unknown Winners of Mexico’s Energy Reform,” published in 2021 in El País with Adam Williams. The report revealed connections between Mexican Federal Electricity Commission executives and Whitewater Midstream, a US company that secured multimillion-dollar contracts during the Peña Nieto administration. “I see that the rest of the awardees have had similar investigations aimed at exposing the economic interests of private actors and the way they interact with, or perhaps even corrupt, the public sector,” Cota observed.
Cota believes that while many business and economics outlets in Latin America focus too narrowly on elite interests, independent investigative teams—such as ICIJ’s partners Convoca in Peru, Ciper in Chile, Armando.info in Venezuela, and Connectas and CLIP—are doing vital work to connect financial reporting with everyday realities. “Media outlets would benefit from grounding these topics more. However, very good journalism is being done in Latin America in this regard,” she said.
As Cota and her colleagues prepare for the award ceremony, the broader context of North American economic relations is anything but settled. On October 2, 2025, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stood together in Mexico City, pledging to strengthen trade ties as the US threatens new tariffs and the future of the USMCA hangs in the balance. Their meeting—Carney’s first as Canada’s leader—came with symbolic gestures: walking hand in hand into the presidential palace and exchanging gifts, a show of unity amid uncertainty.
“North America is the economic envy of the world and is the most competitive economic region of the world, and part of the reason for that is the cooperation between Canada and Mexico,” Carney said at a press conference. “We complement the United States. We make them stronger. We are all stronger together.”
With the USMCA up for review in 2026, the stakes are high. More than 75% of Canada’s exports and over 80% of Mexico’s go to the United States, making the region’s economies deeply intertwined. Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, announced that the two countries had agreed to a plan for “a new era of further strengthening economic ties,” including increased trade via maritime routes to bypass US territory.
Relations between Canada and Mexico have not always been smooth. Last year, some Canadian provincial premiers suggested excluding Mexico from future trade agreements with the US, a move that caused diplomatic friction. Ontario Premier Doug Ford even called Trump’s comparison of Canada to Mexico “the most insulting thing I’ve ever heard from our friends and closest allies, the United States of America.” Yet, as Canadian Senator Peter Boehm noted, recent gestures—such as Carney inviting Sheinbaum to the G7 summit in Alberta—have helped thaw relations. Mexico is now Canada’s third-largest trading partner after the US and China, while Canada ranks fifth for Mexico.
In these moments—whether in the halls of Columbia University or the corridors of Mexico City’s presidential palace—the stories of individuals like Isabella Cota and the decisions of leaders like Carney and Sheinbaum remind us that the personal and the political, the investigative and the diplomatic, are always intertwined. As North America faces new challenges and opportunities, the work of journalists and policymakers alike will shape the future of the region in ways both visible and unseen.
