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 35 years — including for Newsweek as its Mexico City bureau chief and for Time as its Latin America and Miami bureau chief — and he has interviewed more than 20 heads of state, from Mexico to Brazil.
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
-
Data show most migrants the Trump administration is deporting, including in South Florida, are non-criminals — and increasingly they're people who are being sent back to countries they haven't seen in decades. -
COMMENTARY Venezuela's first World Baseball Classic title win, against the U.S. in Miami, inevitably packed political symbolism — but it radiated a more important reminder of the country's character. -
COMMENTARY President Trump's Shield of the Americas agenda to militarize hemispheric crime-fighting risks diminishing crucial efforts to build better police in Latin America and the Caribbean. -
Former CBS4 anchorman Eliott Rodriguez confirms he's running for the seat of Miami Republican Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar — raising the prospect of an unusually competitive race in Florida's 27th District. -
The guest list for President Trump's Shield of the Americas summit at his resort hotel in Doral includes exclusively leaders aligned with his western hemisphere policies, such as declaring drug cartels "narco-terrorists." -
COMMENTARY Cuban regime change may take more time and effort than expected — meaning Cuban exile leaders like Congressman Carlos Gimenez shouldn't alienate potential partners like Jamaica. -
Cuban officials accuse former political prisoner and now Miami resident Maritza Lugo Fernandez of organizing the alleged Cuban expat boat raid – though she apparently did not take part in it. -
Alleged expat 'terrorist' said he was 'ready to die' to free Cuba — and called exile leaders cowardsCuba says two of the ten Cuban expats captured after a shootout with its coast guard were already on the regime's terrorist list — and in a recent video, one of them urged "cowardly" exiles to die to free the communist island. Meanwhile, it emerged that the boat used by the expats may have been stolen from a home in the Florida Keys. -
COMMENTARY The U.S. is great at designating criminal groups as terrorists — but it's a hypocritical failure at preventing the trafficking of guns that aids those terrorists, including Mexico's narco-cartels. -
Cuban entrepreneurs like Aldo Alvarez hope Secretary of State Marco Rubio's pitch for economic as well as political rights will move Havana's communists — and Miami's exiles — to take the private sector more seriously amid the island's humanitarian emergency. -
COMMENTARY President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio seem to have tuned out Venezuelan and Cuban exile leaders — and their own rhetoric about blocking China's influence in the Americas. -
Miami Republican Congressmen Carlos Gimenez and other Cuban exile leaders are urging the Trump administration to cancel all export licenses that send luxury goods to communist Cuba — even though data indicate it's hardly a problem.
