Sergio R. Bustos
Vice President for NewsHe joined WLRN as VP for News in January 2023 to lead the NPR affiliate's award-winning news team.
Bustos was a reporter for two decades at newspapers large and small, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, before becoming an editor at the Miami Herald in 2005, and since has served as editor of POLITICO Florida and deputy opinion editor for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Most recently, Bustos was Enterprise/Politics Editor for the USA Today Network-Florida’s 18 newsrooms.
Bustos also worked as regional manager with the local-journalism nonprofit Report for America will jumpstart efforts to secure resources for WLRN News’ ambitious plans. He was South regional manager for RFA, a non-profit that seeks to fill “news deserts” caused by the nationwide crisis in journalism.
Born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in Annandale, Va., Bustos began his journalism career at The Washington Post — delivering the newspaper as a teenager in suburban northern Virginia.
After graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University, Bustos went to work as a reporter for newspapers in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley — the News-Virginian in Waynesboro and Daily News-Leader in Staunton — before becoming a general assignment reporter at the Wilmington, Del., News-Journal.
He later joined The Philadelphia Inquirer as a reporter after his News-Journal editor recruited him to the big-city newspaper.
At The Inquirer, he won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award in 1992 for a series of stories that revealed how courts and police routinely violated rights of Spanish-speaking farmworkers in southeastern Pennsylvania.
He also was among the lead reporters who exposed a scandal involving thousands of fraudulent absentee ballots that prompted a federal judge to nullify the election of a Democratic state senator. The Inquirer was later named as a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for the stories.
He was one of 10 journalists nationwide to be awarded a John and Catherine MacArthur Foundation grant to study at the University of Southern California’s Center for International Journalists, where he traveled and wrote extensively about Mexico and Cuba in 1992-1993.
Bustos spent more than six years as a Washington correspondent for the former Gannett News Service. He covered the contentious national debate over immigration and border security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, for Gannett’s southwestern newspapers, including The Arizona Republic.
He joined the Miami Herald as a first-time editor in 2005. He ran the teams covering police and courts, as well as Broward County, and he served as state and politics editor. He also was Sunday editor. In 2012, he supervised an award-winning investigation into a local congressman’s involvement in a campaign finance scandal, and oversaw coverage of several governor races and presidential elections. He co-authored a book, Miami's Criminal Past Uncovered, chronicling the city’s most notorious crimes, with Herald reporter Luisa Yanez in 2007.
Bustos returned to reporting in 2015 when he joined The Associated Press as a national political correspondent to cover the 2016 presidential campaign, assigned to cover candidates Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
He was later named editor of POLITICO Florida, where he edited a series of stories that led to the resignation of one of Florida’s most powerful state senators amid sexual harassment allegations from six women who were on the lawmaker’s staff or had lobbied him. He oversaw coverage of the Florida Legislature.
Before joining WLRN, he was Enterprise/Politics Editor for the USA Today Network-Florida’s 18 newsrooms. He coordinated coverage of the 2022 governor and U.S. Senate elections and worked with other newsrooms to cover Gov. Ron DeSantis’ controversial migrant relocation program and the devastating impact of Hurricane Ian.
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As Cuba grapples with a crumbling power grid and heightened tensions with the Trump administration, Havana’s top diplomat said Sunday that the Cuban military is ready to defend itself against the U.S. -
“We cut off all oil, all money, or we cut off everything coming in from Venezuela, which was the sole source. And they want to make a deal,” Trump told POLITICO. -
The chats reportedly featured Miami-Dade County Republican Party members and contained hundreds of uses of the n-word and many other instances of antisemitic slurs, replete with references to Nazi Germany. -
Lev Parnas, a former associate of Rudy Giuliani who was a key figure in former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment investigation, is joining a crowded field of Democratic candidates seeking to unseat Republican incumbent U.S. Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar. -
The speedboat carrying 10 armed Cubans from the U.S — now part of a widening investigation by both the U.S. and Cuban government — was reported stolen from a Big Pine Key dock by its owner who learned it was missing from the media, according to the Monroe Country Sheriff’s Office. -
“As the Cuban regime enters its final hour, the cry for freedom is no longer a whisper. It is a roar,” said Salazar, a daughter of Cuban exiles, in a statement late Monday. “Rosa María Payá embodies the moral courage this dictatorship has tried to crush for decades and failed to extinguish." -
A Colombian legislator joined local clergy and immigrant advocates on Sunday in demanding Alligator Alcatraz be closed and detainees released to end what they describe as a "national and international" human rights crisis. -
Global pop star Camila Cabello calls for urgent aid to her native Cuba to stem 'humanitarian crisis'She said she is speaking out because the "Cuban people are suffering in an echo chamber where no one can hear them because to speak is to risk your life." -
In a Feb. 13 letter to President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi, the lawmakers want federal law enforcement authorities “to review previously compiled evidence, take a fresh look at command responsibility at the highest levels of the Cuban regime, and use every available legal tool to hold accountable those responsible for the killing[s].” -
"When nearly one in five home purchases in Miami is investor-financed, it fundamentally changes market dynamics for everyday buyers,” Jake Stoddard, Owner of Reliable Cash House Buyers, said in a statement accompanying the report. -
In an exclusive sit-down with NBC News’ Kristen Welker from Caracas, Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez committed to holding "free and fair" elections while signaling a potential thaw in relations with the United States. -
Faith leaders across the county, led by BOLD Justice, held a news conference Tuesday morning in downtown Fort Lauderdale to raise awareness of the countywide affordable housing shortage. They say only one in four families in Broward County can afford a place to live.
