JOURNALIST
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Indigenous Ecuadorians show banner protesting the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, March 2006
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My transition from a local writer into an international scribe began in 2000...
Roundtable with fellow journalists and Cuban academics at the University of Havana, 2006.
That was the year I traveled to Cuba with a group of my colleagues.
Once there, I met people who made do with one pair of shoes each year, who scraped together meals from government rations and from their meager Cuban pesos salary.
But I also saw a people who still celebrate African deities through the Yoruba religion that slave masters tried to snuff out centuries ago, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Ernest Hemingway.
I encountered people who spoke at least two languages and, in some cases, knew more about world news than me.
That drove home a lesson on how people may be materially poor but culturally rich, the ties that bind us, and people can be disillusioned with their government without wanting to see outside forces overthrow it.
It also showed me how important is it for U.S. journalists to understand that even in the poorest countries people still have strong national identities and a desire to shape their own destinies.
Today I continue to tell their stories, stories that strive to present their lives beyond the narrative of poverty and oppression, and what others can learn from them.
To find my work, go to www.ifajs.org.
Once there, I met people who made do with one pair of shoes each year, who scraped together meals from government rations and from their meager Cuban pesos salary.
But I also saw a people who still celebrate African deities through the Yoruba religion that slave masters tried to snuff out centuries ago, as well as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Ernest Hemingway.
I encountered people who spoke at least two languages and, in some cases, knew more about world news than me.
That drove home a lesson on how people may be materially poor but culturally rich, the ties that bind us, and people can be disillusioned with their government without wanting to see outside forces overthrow it.
It also showed me how important is it for U.S. journalists to understand that even in the poorest countries people still have strong national identities and a desire to shape their own destinies.
Today I continue to tell their stories, stories that strive to present their lives beyond the narrative of poverty and oppression, and what others can learn from them.
To find my work, go to www.ifajs.org.
Barbados' island treasure - superbly educated students
Queen's College students get pumped over Monopoly
It's amazing what a determined country can achieve - and which stereotypes it can defy - when it puts its money and values in the right place.
Barbados has the fourth highest literacy rate in the world. The United States is rated 23th. It ranks 19th among nations in what it spends on education. The United States ranks 44th. And, according to the United Nations’ Human Development Index, an indicator of a nation’s quality of life as well as its wealth, Barbados is first among developing nations. The United States ranks 12th.
When I went to Barbados in 2009 as part of a research project on the black-white achievement gap, I saw what happens when education is treated as a serious part of a nation's consciousness; when it's not just about getting a high-paying job but about personal dignity.
To read more, go to http://www.ifajs.org/v12ifajsnewsletter.pdf
Barbados has the fourth highest literacy rate in the world. The United States is rated 23th. It ranks 19th among nations in what it spends on education. The United States ranks 44th. And, according to the United Nations’ Human Development Index, an indicator of a nation’s quality of life as well as its wealth, Barbados is first among developing nations. The United States ranks 12th.
When I went to Barbados in 2009 as part of a research project on the black-white achievement gap, I saw what happens when education is treated as a serious part of a nation's consciousness; when it's not just about getting a high-paying job but about personal dignity.
To read more, go to http://www.ifajs.org/v12ifajsnewsletter.pdf
When newsgathering hits a wall, dogged journalism hoists it over the top...
I did such heavy lifting in March of 2006, when it took me two days and a dash through a rock-throwing protest to track down Lenin Hurtado, the son of Ecuador's first black senator, Jaime Hurtado, who was killed in office. Here's what he told me for this piece.
The Silencing of Jaime Hurtado
Lenin Hurtado, March 2006
March 2006
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador – Lenin Hurtado has a bustling law practice here. But he
isn’t interested in building wealth for himself as much as he is
interested in building foundations for justice for the poorest Ecuadorians.
It’s a passion he comes by honestly. His father was Jaime Hurtado – a lawyer and the first Afro-Ecuadorian to be elected to that country’s Congress in 1979. In 1984, Hurtado did a Jesse Jackson turn and ran for president.
“He came in fourth,” Lenin Hurtado said. “But he was the first [Afro-Ecuadorian] to run for president. He was one of the leaders of leftist thought in Latin America…he always defended the workers and the laborers. Never the big guy.”
But Hurtado didn’t get a chance to see his dream of an Ecuador controlled by its marginalized working classes. On Feb.17, 1999, he and two other leaders of his national organization, the Democratic Popular Movement, were gunned down in Quito, Ecuador’s capital.
Government officials have blamed the killings on right-wing Colombian death squads. They said the death squads did Hurtado in because he was using the Colombian guerilla group, the FARC, to teach his political group how to start an insurgency movement in Ecuador. But others, including Amnesty International, suspect that Hurtado was targeted for assassination by the Ecuador government
for his role in leading strikes and protests against the policies of its then-president, Jamil Mahuad.
In either case, Hurtado’s assassins have not been caught.
“I became a public guy on the day he was assassinated, because I was going to have to push the fight to look into it,” said Lenin Hurtado, who was 32 when his father was killed. “That day, I became a leader…I have enemies now.”
To read the rest of the article, go to http://www.ifajs.org//newsroom/jaime_hurtado.html
GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador – Lenin Hurtado has a bustling law practice here. But he
isn’t interested in building wealth for himself as much as he is
interested in building foundations for justice for the poorest Ecuadorians.
It’s a passion he comes by honestly. His father was Jaime Hurtado – a lawyer and the first Afro-Ecuadorian to be elected to that country’s Congress in 1979. In 1984, Hurtado did a Jesse Jackson turn and ran for president.
“He came in fourth,” Lenin Hurtado said. “But he was the first [Afro-Ecuadorian] to run for president. He was one of the leaders of leftist thought in Latin America…he always defended the workers and the laborers. Never the big guy.”
But Hurtado didn’t get a chance to see his dream of an Ecuador controlled by its marginalized working classes. On Feb.17, 1999, he and two other leaders of his national organization, the Democratic Popular Movement, were gunned down in Quito, Ecuador’s capital.
Government officials have blamed the killings on right-wing Colombian death squads. They said the death squads did Hurtado in because he was using the Colombian guerilla group, the FARC, to teach his political group how to start an insurgency movement in Ecuador. But others, including Amnesty International, suspect that Hurtado was targeted for assassination by the Ecuador government
for his role in leading strikes and protests against the policies of its then-president, Jamil Mahuad.
In either case, Hurtado’s assassins have not been caught.
“I became a public guy on the day he was assassinated, because I was going to have to push the fight to look into it,” said Lenin Hurtado, who was 32 when his father was killed. “That day, I became a leader…I have enemies now.”
To read the rest of the article, go to http://www.ifajs.org//newsroom/jaime_hurtado.html
Girls in the Costa Chica of Guerrero, Mexico, March 2005...
The Costa Chica - meaning "short coast" - is one of two regions in Mexico with large black populations. The other is Veracruz on the Gulf Coast; it was founded, in fact, by an escaped slave, or cimmarone, known as Yanga. Conquistadors and settlers began importing Africans to Mexico in the 1500s after the fall of the Aztec empire and the arrival of the Spaniards decimated the native population with disease and hard labor. The descendants of those slaves can be found here, in a place filled with dusty roads, umbrella and palm trees and all kinds of undeveloped agrarian beauty. But there's a museum that explains it all - the Museum of the Afro-Mexican - and provides another piece of the puzzle of where Africans landed in the Western Hemisphere and how their influence is still felt.
History laid out on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela, 2007...
Grenadians reminisce about Maurice Bishop and shattered dreams of self-sufficiency
Carlyle "C.J." Williams and Edwin Mitchell
I traveled to the seaside village of Gouyave, Grenada in 2003 to look at how citizens of this tiny tropical nation had fared since their beloved Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop, was assassinated 20 years earlier and President Ronald Reagan launched "Operation Urgent Fury," to put down the unrest that followed and to assuage fears that it might become Cuba's Communist twin in the Caribbean.
While many in Gouyave, which was the stronghold of the 1979 revolution, said they were glad to see the U.S. troops arrive because they feared that worse times would come because of rifts within the government that led to Bishop's slaying, they said they wished they could have had more of a chance to make some of the ideas of the revolution, such as free transportation and schooling, to work.
Said Carlyle "C.J. Williams: : "I miss the revolution for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it made Grenadians realize how to use their own resources, and not depend on anyone else. That's when it became a threat, because what we were doing, with the free education and all, was organizing black people..we loved Maurice Bishop because he was helping us to become independent as black people...it was a sad time in Gouyave when he died."
Said Edwin Mitchell: "It [the revolution] brought the leadership into the pasture. It wasn't the kind of leadership that fed on the sheep."
While many in Gouyave, which was the stronghold of the 1979 revolution, said they were glad to see the U.S. troops arrive because they feared that worse times would come because of rifts within the government that led to Bishop's slaying, they said they wished they could have had more of a chance to make some of the ideas of the revolution, such as free transportation and schooling, to work.
Said Carlyle "C.J. Williams: : "I miss the revolution for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it made Grenadians realize how to use their own resources, and not depend on anyone else. That's when it became a threat, because what we were doing, with the free education and all, was organizing black people..we loved Maurice Bishop because he was helping us to become independent as black people...it was a sad time in Gouyave when he died."
Said Edwin Mitchell: "It [the revolution] brought the leadership into the pasture. It wasn't the kind of leadership that fed on the sheep."
