Tim Padgett
Americas EditorTim Padgett is the Americas Editor for WLRN, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida.
Padgett has reported on Latin America for more than 30 years — including for Newsweek as its Mexico City bureau chief and for Time as its Latin America and Miami bureau chief — from the end of Central America's civil wars to the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations. He has interviewed more than 20 heads of state.
In 2005, Padgett received Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize for his body of work in Latin America. In 2016 he won a national Edward R. Murrow award for the radio series "The Migration Maze," about the brutal causes of — and potential solutions to — Central American migration.
Padgett is an Indiana native and a graduate of Wabash College. He received a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School and studied in Caracas, Venezuela, at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello. He has been an adult literacy volunteer and is a member of the Catholic poverty aid organization St. Vincent de Paul.
Contact Tim at tpadgett@wlrnnews.org
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Puerto Rico's pro-independence party looked like it had little chance to win the island's gubernatorial race — until vile comments were made about the U.S. territory at a Trump rally last week. It still looked likely to lose to the pro-statehood party on Tuesday, but the closer contest may signal a new political dynamic there.
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A degrading social media meme falsely depicts Nicaraguan migrants who've come to the U.S. legally on a humanitarian parole as agents of Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega — the same brutal dictator they fled.
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COMMENTARY Jeff Bezos' Miami roots should have warned him to avoid the unmistakable impression that he let a major U.S. daily cave to the intimidation of an authoritarian bully like Donald Trump.
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Donald Trump's reprehensible lie about Haitian immigrants has stoked violent threats toward Haitian-Americans — but a big question is whether there are enough high-profile Haitian elected officials in the U.S. to make the community's response more politically potent.
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This week a federal appeals court threw out a lower court judgment that Carnival, Norwegian, Royal Caribbean and MSC Cruises had taken tourists to Cuba in violation of U.S. law.
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According to a recent poll by Florida International University, 68% of Miami Cubans support former President Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election
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COMMENTARY Donald Trump certainly leans fascist — but outright calling him a fascist risks insulting actual fascists' victims, just as equating Kamala Harris with communist dictators insults theirs.
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With Cuba still in near total blackout, Cuban-Americans are having trouble making contact with family and friends on the island — but what they do hear is fear that there's no solution to the crisis this time.
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COMMENTARY It's a good bet Pre-Columbian peoples would have been smarter about modern hurricanes than Florida's climate change denier-in-chief is showing himself to be.
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A week after one of the worst gang massacres in Haitian history, another gang has besieged the strategic coastal town of Arcahaie, threatening even greater expansion of criminal control throughout Haiti.
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Former President Trump told Fox News he’s targeting the more than half a million Cuban, Venezuelan, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants who’ve come here legally under a humanitarian parole program.
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COMMENTARY: Donald Trump's abhorrent lies have perhaps permanently refashioned Americans' sense of immigration reality — the way climate change has resigned them to ovenlike heat — and may very well help him win in November.