1976

The scholarship changed my life. It allowed me to remain in Bogotá where i had been living for two years, and then take a fi ve-month journey through Latin America during which I published in several newspapers and magazines. Although I had worked as an editor at The Cali Chronicle, the trip broadened my contacts and helped me sign up major bureaus (National Catholic Reporter, Miami Herald, Time Magazine).

Coincidentally, that year the IAPA was meeting in Cartagena and asked me to help at the conference. That led to a long association with the organization and in1996 the new Impunity Program invited me to act as the investigator In Guatemala. Out of that work my fi rst book was published: Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced: the Irma Flaquer Story. Today I edit ReVista, The Harvard Review of Latin America, published by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS). Our most recent issue was on the press in America with articles by Gonzalo Marroquin and Ricardo Trotti, illustrated with drawings by Trotti.

I teach journalism on the faculty of Harvard’s Extension School. I am author of Una Gringa in Bogotá (Santillana, Bogotá, 2007), published in English in 2010 as A Gringa in Bogota: Living Colombia’s Invisible War (University of Texas Press). I am also an advisor to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Fulbright Colombia and Harvard undergraduates interested in journalism. I am the liaison between the Nieman Foundation and DRCLAS, and board member of the Maria Moors Cabot Awards.

The IAPA embarked me on a career that would not have been possible without the scholarship.