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| Summer Edition | |
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| Summer Edition | |
BY KIM BROCKWAY
Three journalists, reporting for U.S. News & World Report, The Miami Herald, and the Mexican daily newspaper Público, have been selected by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism to receive the 1999 Maria Moors Cabot Prizes for courageous, comprehensive and compassionate reporting on Latin America. Special citations will be presented to the founder of an independent Cuban news agency and an American newspaper publisher for their efforts to promote a free press.
In their 61st year, the awards are presented to those who have reported on the southern hemisphere with a longtime commitment to inter-American understanding and freedom of the press.
The Cabot Prizes will be presented Wednesday, September 29, on the Columbia campus to:
Jorge Zepeda Patterson, editor-in-chief and founder of Público, a daily newspaper published in Guadalajara, Mexico;
Linda Robinson, Latin America bureau chief of U.S. News & World Report;
Juan Tamayo, Latin America correspondent, The Miami Herald.
Special citations, in recognition of their efforts to promote freedom of expression, will be awarded to:
James McClatchy, publisher, McClatchy Newspapers, and
Raul Rivero, founder and president of Cuba Press news agency, Havana, Cuba.
Ernestina Herrera de Noble, president of Grupo Clarín in Buenos Aires, and George Irish, vice president of the Hearst Corporation in New York, are serving as co-chairs of the event. For the first time, the Cabot Prize dinner ceremony will include a benefit to support scholarships for international students at the Journalism School.
Founded in 1938 (and first awarded in 1939) by the late Godfrey Lowell Cabot of Boston as a memorial to his wife, the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes are administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. They will be presented by Columbia President George Rupp and Journalism School Dean Tom Goldstein in formal ceremonies on September 29 in the Rotunda of Low Memorial Library, Broadway and 116th Street in New York. Each winner will receive a Cabot gold medal and a $1,500 honorarium. With this year's awards, 221 prizes and 51 special citations will have been conferred on journalists from more than 30 countries.
The prizes, the oldest international awards in journalism, are awarded by the Trustees of Columbia on the recommendation of the dean of the Journalism School. An advisory committee of journalists and educators concerned with hemisphere affairs assists the dean. Nominations are also sought from news organizations and individuals throughout Latin and North America. Director of the advisory committee is Anne Nelson, director of the International Division of the Journalism School and formerly executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Information on the 1999 winners follows:
Jorge Zepeda Patterson is editor-in-chief and founder of Público, a daily newspaper published in Guadalajara, Mexico, and widely regarded as a beacon of independent journalism in the region. As a founder of Público, and before that as a journalist at Siglo 21, Zepeda has set high standards for investigative journalism and editorial independence.
Under his leadership, Siglo 21 established its reputation and captured a devoted readership with its coverage of the 1992 explosion of an underground pipeline in Guadalajara in which more than 400 people were killed. His editing had an international impact several years later, when the U.S. Congress was deciding whether to certify Mexico's progress in combating narcotics. The newspaper's reporting about drug searches of the home of Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the powerful military commander who had recently been appointed to head the federal anti-narcotics agency, forced the military to admit that the general was a partner of Mexico's most notorious trafficker.
Patterson left Siglo 21 after its publisher sought to curb his editorial freedom and founded Público. Earlier this year the newspaper demonstrated how far drug traffickers have reached into Mexico's political institutions and elites when it revealed that a brother of Mexico's President, Ernesto Zedillo, had nearly completed a business deal with money-launderers working for a drug cartel.
Linda Robinson, Latin America bureau chief of U.S. News & World Report since 1989, has shown unusual skill and tenacity at focusing the attention of American readers on the region. She has traveled throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, reporting and writing over 200 articles on such varied topics as refugee crises, guerrilla conflicts, drug trafficking, electoral upsets, coup attempts, squatters' movements and trade accords. She has visited Cuba 20 times and interviewed Fidel Castro twice, as well as many other Latin American presidents. Her reporting anticipated the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990, and her investigative work includes exposés of money laundering by Panamanian President Guillermo Endara, improprieties at Radio Marti, links between Mexican Raul Salinas and Colombian cartels, and U.S. plans for invading Cuba in the 1960s.
Robinson has written freelance articles for magazines such as World Policy Journal, Survival, and Foreign Affairs, and is the author of Intervention or Neglect, a book about Central America and Panama. She was senior editor at Foreign Affairs quarterly, and a writer and editor at the Wilson Quarterly. She frequently addresses public audiences and foreign policy groups, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Juan Tamayo, Latin America correspondent for The Miami Herald, has covered Central American conflicts by providing a historical context so that readers can better understand the issues faced by the United States and the region's inhabitants. Born in Cuba, he came to the United States when he was 13.
Tamayo joined the Herald in 1982 as Central America correspondent and later served as chief of the paper's Middle East and European bureaus and as foreign editor. He was previously an editor and reporter for United Press International in Mexico, New York, and Connecticut and a reporter for the Bridgeport Post.
A winner of the Overseas Press Club award for foreign analysis and the Sigma Delta Chi award for foreign reporting (both for a series on terrorism in Europe), Tamayo was a Nieman fellow at Harvard University (1989) and an Inter American Press Association fellow at the National University of Argentina in Buenos Aires (1971).
Special citations will be presented to:
James McClatchy, publisher, McClatchy Newspapers, has worked tirelessly to bring about, promote, and disseminate principles of freedom of expression and of the press in the hemisphere. He conceived of the 1994 Declaration of Chapultepec, a proclamation of free speech written by private citizens and signed by 19 heads of state in the Western Hemisphere, including the leaders of Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico, Chile and the U.S., as well as nearly 2,000 other politicians, journalists, writers and intellectuals.
Previously a reporter for The Sacramento Bee and The Fresno Bee, McClatchy has also been editor and publisher of a number of weekly newspapers. He is past president and board member of the French American International School; a member of the executive committee for the National Center for International Schools; ex-president and director of the Inter American Press Association, and he has been active in a number of conservation organizations.
Raul Rivero, founder and president of Cuba Press news agency, has reported from Cuba despite harassment, arrests and threats from the government. As the leading member of a group of non-government journalists,
Rivero has emerged as a crusader for freedom of expression. His writing is published on the Internet as well as in El Nuevo Herald, the Knight-Ridder Spanish language newspaper in Miami, and other newspapers outside of Cuba.
Rivero was one of the first generation of journalists trained at the Havana faculty of journalism after the 1959 revolution. A founder of the critical cultural magazine Caiman Barbudo, he was Prensa Latina's Moscow correspondent from 1973 to 1976, and upon his return to Cuba, headed the science and culture service of the state news agency.
In 1989 he resigned from the official National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists and two years later made an official break with the regime by signing the "ten intellectuals' letter," a petition calling on Castro to free prisoners of conscience. The only one of the ten signatories still living in Cuba, Rivero abandoned official journalism in 1991, denouncing it as "fiction about a country that does not exist." Four years later he founded Cuba Press news agency, becoming one of the pioneers of the dissident press on the island, and was later appointed regional vice president for Cuba by the Inter American Press Association. He has published several collections of poems, a collection of interviews with Cuban intellectuals, and a book about his Soviet experiences.
The recommendations are made with the advice and approval of the Advisory Committee on the Maria Moors Cabot prizes. Members of the Committee are: Dean Tom Goldstein; Anne Nelson, director of the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes; Don Bohning, Latin America editor of The Miami Herald; Shirley Christian, formerly of The New York Times and now senior writer at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, Missouri; Peter Cleaves, former director of the Center for the Study of Western Hemispheric Trade at the University of Texas, now with the Avina Foundation in Austin, Texas; Robert Cox, assistant editor of the Charleston (South Carolina) News & Courier; John Dinges, former editorial director of National Public Radio, now an assistant professor at the Journalism School; Claude Erbsen, vice president and director of World Services for the Associated Press; Frank Manitzas, former Latin America correspondent for ABC News; Mark Rosenberg, acting president and provost of Florida International University; Edward Seaton, editor and publisher of The Manhattan (Kansas) Mercury, and past president of the Inter American Press Association; and Geri Smith, Mexico Bureau Chief for BusinessWeek. Seven of the twelve members of the Advisory Board are Cabot medalists.