About Me
Children atop a woodpile in El Alto, Bolivia
I'm a journalist with 30 years of experience in the United States and Latin America. I specialize in reporting on and writing about Latin America, its people, politics, cultures and history. I consider myself to be a political moderate and do not subscribe to radical solutions of any kind. In fact, whenever someone on the extreme Right or extreme Left criticizes my work, I consider it good evidence that I'm doing something right. Extremes on all sides, in my opinion, do not advance or defend the best interests of the great majority of people in the middle.
Over the years, I have lived and worked in several Latin American countries, and several U.S. states. I have two grown children, one in Oregon, the other in Spain. Their mother is Bolivian.
My parents lived for several years in Bolivia during World War II, and I grew up with the smell of alpaca and vicuna rugs on the floor. My first newspaper piece appeared in 1975 in The Christian Science Monitor. It was an op-ed piece on the lasting impacts of the 1952 Bolivian National Revolution, for which I was paid $50.