The OAS Assistant Secretary General Laura Gil to participate in the meeting
Miami (August 22, 2025) — Editors, media executives, and leading journalists from across the Americas will gather in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, October 16–19, for the 81st General Assembly of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA). The event will focus on the most pressing challenges to press freedom in the region, with special emphasis on sustainability and artificial intelligence.
The Assembly will feature the participation of Laura Gil, recently elected Assistant Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS). Gil is a political scientist, journalist, media analyst, and opinion columnist, born in Uruguay and naturalized in Colombia.
Among the confirmed speakers is Jon Lee Anderson, staff writer at The New Yorker, who began his career in the 1980s covering the civil wars in Central America. Since 1998, he has reported on conflicts in Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Angola, Mali, Liberia, and the Central African Republic, while also producing extensive coverage of Latin America. He is the author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and has published profiles of Gabriel García Márquez, Augusto Pinochet, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Juan Carlos I, Hamid Karzai, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Charles Taylor, among others.
Also participating will be Carlos Fernando Chamorro, a Nicaraguan journalist exiled in Costa Rica, founder and director of Confidencial and of the programs Esta Semana and Esta Noche. He was editor of the newspaper Barricada (1980–1994), is a member of the Governing Council of the Gabo Foundation, and has received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize (2010), the Ortega y Gasset Award (2021), and WAN-IFRA’s Golden Pen of Freedom (2023).
The program will include an opinion journalism workshop led by Boris Muñoz, Venezuelan journalist and contributor to The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek, and other leading outlets in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. Muñoz founded the Spanish-language opinion section of The New York Times in 2016 and later served as Senior Opinion Editor for Latin America at the English edition. He is the author of several books, including La Ley de la Calle (1995). His accolades include the Maria Moors Cabot Prize (2019), a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard (2009), and a Public Policy Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson Center (2024).
The Assembly will also feature a presentation by Marina Walker Guevara, Executive Director of the Pulitzer Center and a leading expert in collaborative investigative journalism. Before joining the Center, she served as Deputy Director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), where she led two of the largest cross-border reporting projects in history: the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, which mobilized hundreds of journalists and used advanced technology to analyze terabytes of leaked financial data, exposing stories of profound public interest.
Click here to register for the IAPA General Assembly.
Throughout the event, panels and presentations will address the most urgent issues affecting the information ecosystem in the Americas: press freedom and democracy, sustainability and business models, digital transformation, innovation, and the application of artificial intelligence in journalism. Country-by-country reports on the state of press freedom in the region will also be presented.
The Assembly will also host the 2025 IAPA Awards for Excellence in Journalism, as well as the Association’s most prestigious honors: the Chapultepec Grand Prize, the Grand Prize for Press Freedom, the Friend of the Press Award, and the Executive of the Year Award.
Registration and lodging. Early registration guarantees participation in the most important press gathering in the Americas and provides access to preferential rates at the host hotel, The Westin Puntacana. Reservations are already available, and early booking is recommended to secure availability.
The IAPA is a non-profit organization dedicated to defending and promoting freedom of the press and expression in the Americas. It comprises more than 1,300 publications from the western hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida, United States.