NAME |
COUNTRY |
María Bettina López | Argentina |
Monica Helena Pilon | Brazil |
Jorge Antonio Villega | Argentina |
Anita Snow | USA |
Gayle Young | USA |
Anita yearned to live and work as a journalist in Latin America when she was awarded an IAPA scholarship. At the time, she was a metro reporter at the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, California, frequently covering the area’s large Spanish-speaking population and increasingly interested in covering and discovering the lands those immigrants left behind. Anita quit her Register job after seven years, put her belongings in storage and headed south for Mexico City, launching a Latin America reporting career spanning more than two decades.
She took several classes at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, and undertook an indepth reporting project examining the ties between a small community called Romita in Guanajuato state and a neighborhood many townsfolk had immigrated to in La Habra, California. Her package of stories from the project were later published by her former newspaper, the Register. While in Mexico, Anita was hired locally by the Associated Press in 1988, later going on to work for the news agency in as a reporter in Los Angeles and editor in New York. In 1993, the AP sent Anita back to Mexico City as a correspondent for Mexico and Central America, and she subsequently reported extensively across the region thorughout the 1990s, covering stories including the Zapatista uprising Mexico, the military intervention in Haiti, the end of civil war in Guatemala, the papal visit to Haiti.
She served as AP’s news editor for Mexico and CentralAmerica and in 1999 was assigned to reopen AP’s bureau in Havana after a nearly 30-year absence. Snow stayed for a decade, covering stories ranging from the fight over the Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez to Fidel Castro’s illness and eventual resignation. She left Cuba with a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University in mid-2009, and upon her return to the AP in 2010 was assigned to cover the United Nations, where she’s learning about other regions of the world.