Biographies

Mónica Almeida is the Quito editor of El Universo, headquartered in Guayaquil, Ecuador. She has worked as a journalist for the past 24 years in both Ecuador and France and in her current position, has led workshops on computer-assisted reporting and investigative reporting. She also has given talks and prepared workshops for journalists at local universities. Almeida recently joined a group of journalists and organizations at a hearing before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), in Washington D.C., to testify about the problems that are affecting freedom of expression in Ecuador. A court there sentenced El Universo columnist Emilio Palacio and three executives at the newspaper to three years in prison and ordered them to pay $40 million in damages to Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa. Currently, there are more than a dozen lawsuits against journalists and the media in the country. Almeida was a 2009 Nieman Fellow at Harvard.

Rosental Alves is director of the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and Knight Chair in Journalism and UNESCO Chair in Communication at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism. He began his academic career in the United States in 1996 after 27 years as a journalist in Brazil. He moved to Austin from Rio de Janeiro, where he was the managing editor and member of the board of directors of Jornal do Brasil and had served for more than a decade as a foreign correspondent for the paper. In 1991, Alves created the first online, real-time finance news service, the first of its kind in Brazil. And in 1994, he managed the launch of Jornal do Brasil’s online edition, making it the first Brazilian newspaper available on the Internet. In 1995 he was chosen to be the first holder of the Knight Chair in International Journalism and in 2002, he received a $2 million grant from the Knight Foundation to create the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, a four-year project to work in training programs with journalists from Latin America and the Caribbean. Alves has been a frequent speaker in conferences and has conducted numerous workshops in several countries to train journalists and journalism professors on the use of the new medium. Alves is a member of boards or advisory councils of several international organizations. He was the first Brazilian awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard (class of 1988) and is a member of the Nieman Advisory Board.

Claudia Méndez Arriaza is editor and staff writer at El Periódico in Guatemala where she has covered the courts and worked as an investigative reporter, often focusing on human rights crimes, the drug trade and state corruption stories. She also is a co-host for the television news program “A las 8:45” produced by Canal Antigua. Méndez Arriaza received the National Prize of Journalism for her reports on the trial for the assassination of Monsignor Juan Gerardi and her articles have been published in a number of Latin American journals. She teaches at Universidad Rafael Landívar and is the Spanish translator of “The Art of Political Murder” by Francisco Goldman and “Guatemala Eternal Spring Eternal Tyranny” by Jean Marie Simon. She is a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Fernando Berguido has served as publisher and editor of La Prensa, Panama’s leading daily, for the past seven years. During his tenure, the newspaper won more than a dozen journalism prizes including The National Press Award (twice) and the Inter American Press Association Award for Investigative Journalism. He graduated from Universidad Santa Maria School of Law and later, as a Fulbright Scholar, he earned a master of law degree from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. Berguido is a former president of the Panama Chapter of Transparency International, a member of the Truth Commission and has lectured on constitutional law. He is a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Charlie Clements is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Prior to coming to the Carr Center, Clements, a widely respected human rights activist and public health physician, served as president of Unitarian Universalist Service Committee. Previously, he served as executive director of Border WaterWorks, an initiative of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the El Paso Community Foundation, which assisted small U.S. communities along the border without running water or sewers to construct such desperately needed infrastructure. As a distinguished graduate of the Air Force Academy who had flown more than 50 missions in the Vietnam War, he decided the war was immoral and refused to fly missions in support of the invasion of Cambodia. Later, as a newly trained physician, he chose to work in the midst of El Salvador’s civil war, where the villages he served were bombed, rocketed, or strafed by some of the same aircraft in which he had previously trained. For two years in the late 1980s, Clements served as director of human rights education at UUSC, leading a number of congressional fact-finding delegations to Central America. In 1997, as president of Physicians for Human Rights, he participated both in the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony and the treaty signing for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Clements is author of Witness to War and the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary of the same title.

June Carolyn Erlick is the editor-in-chief of ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America, and the publications director at Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS), where she oversees book series and working papers. She is also the author of “Disappeared: A Journalist Silenced, the Irma Flaquer Story” (Seal Press, 2004), “A Gringa in Bogotá: Living Colombia’s Invisible War” (University of Texas Press, 2010) and “Una Gringa en Bogotá” (Santillana, 2007). She teaches journalism at Harvard Extension School and coordinates the journalism internship program there. Erlick received the James E. Conway Excellence in Teaching Writing Award in 2007. She has lived and worked in Latin America and Germany as a foreign correspondent. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and received her B.A. in philosophy from Barnard College in New York. She received two Fulbright Fellowships, the first to Guatemala in 2000 and to Colombia in 2005-2006.

Stefanie Friedhoff is special projects manager at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. She also is a freelance journalist and science writer for U.S. and European media such as Time, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Folio/Neue Zuercher Zeitung. Friedhoff started her career as a freelance correspondent based in Cambridge, Mass., in 1998. Previously, she worked for BZ, Berlin’s largest daily newspaper, where she was news editor and editor of the Sunday magazine. At the Nieman Foundation, Friedhoff organizes interdisciplinary conferences on diverse subjects such as trauma, journalism and storytelling and religion and human rights and directs the specialized Nieman Fellowship in Global Health Reporting. She was a 2001 Nieman Fellow.

Carlos Eduardo Huertas is the investigations editor at Semana magazine and founder of Consejo de Redacción, or Newsroom Council, a professional association that promotes investigative journalism in Colombia. Huertas has worked for Semana for the past decade and in that time, his team’s coverage of corruption, human rights violations and environmental issues has earned national and international awards: He was part of the team that won the King of Spain Award in 2008 and the Institute for Press and Society and Transparency International Award for best investigative journalism in Latin America in 2007 and 2009.  He is member of The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism and is a 2012 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Juanita León is the founder and editor of La Silla Vacía, a website about Colombian politics that covers stories not previously covered. León wrote in Nieman Reports: “They are the stories that lie behind the news media’s typical daily political reporting. In the United States, political blogs are too numerous to count. But in Colombia, La Silla Vacía is the first such experiment with sustainable independent journalism.” Leon has worked as a reporter for Wall Street Journal Americas, El Tiempo, and Semana magazine; she was editor-in-chief of semana.com. She also was one of the first journalists to reveal the links between several Colombian politicians and paramilitary groups. Her book “País de plomo. Crónicas de Guerra” examines Colombia’s long conflict. She was a 2007 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Steven Levitsky, is professor of government at Harvard University. His fields of interest are comparative and Latin American politics, with a focus on political regimes and regime change, parties and party change, as well as weak and informal institutions. He is author of “Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective”(Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003) and co-editor of “Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness”(Penn State Univ. Press, 2005) and “Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America”(Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 2006). Professor Levitsky is currently finishing a book (with Lucan A. Way) on the emergence and evolution of competitive authoritarian regimes in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the post-communist countries. He is also working on an edited volume (with Kenneth Roberts) on the rise of the Left in contemporary Latin America.

Graciela Mochkofsky is a journalist and nonfiction writer based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the author of five critically acclaimed books and the co-founder and editor of the digital media outlet elpuercoespin. Her books include “Timerman. El periodista que quiso ser parte del poder” (1923-1999), a biography of legendary Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman (Ed. Sudamericana, 2003) and other nonfiction books. She has worked as a political correspondent with major Buenos Aires newspapers and as a freelance feature writer, her work has been published in leading Latin American magazines. She has taught journalism at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires and she was a 2009 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Boris Muñoz, a Venezuelan journalist and writer, is currently is a fellow in the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He also was a 2010 Nieman Fellow and a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic American Literature and Culture from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey and has worked as an investigative reporter, feature writer and columnist. He was a New York correspondent for Venezuela’s El Nacional, chief editor of Nueva Sociedad, and editorial director of Exceso, an investigative journalism magazine in Venezuela. His books include “La ley de la calle, Más allá de la ciudad letrada” and “Despachos del imperio.” He has been awarded the Fernando LázaroCarreter International Award for Journalism and a La Frontera Institute Grant at Dartmouth College. As a fellow at the Latin American Initiative of the Carr Center, Muñoz has been researching and documenting the illegal detention of judge Maria Lourdes Afiuni in Venezuela and is coordinating the Carr Center;s efforts to liberate her, conducted in association with MIT professor Noam Chomsky.

Jeffrey Seglin is lecturer in public policy and director of the Communications Program at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.he writes “The Right Thing,” a weekly column on general ethics that has been syndicated by Tribune Media Services since September 2010. From 2004 through 2010, he wrote an ethics column distributed by The New York Times Syndicate. From 1998 through 2004, Seglin wrote a monthly business ethics column for the Sunday New York Times Money and Business section. Prior to 1998, Seglin was an executive editor at Inc. magazine. He is the author of “The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today’s Business,” which was named one of the Best Business Books of 2003 by the Library Journal. From 1999 until 2011, Seglin was a tenured associate professor at Emerson College in Boston where he was also the director of the graduate program in publishing and writing. He is an ethics fellow at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and was a resident fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life at Harvard in 1998-99. Seglin lectures widely on business ethics, writing and other topics. He also has contributed commentaries to public radio’s Marketplace program and is regularly featured as an expert on ethics on CNN, CNBC, Fox 25 Boston, and other media outlets. He also has written for a number of national publications including Fortune, Real Simple, FSB, Salon.com, Time.com, Sojourners, MIT’s Sloan Management Review, Harvard Management Update, Business 2.0, and Forbes ASAP among others.

Roberto Trotti is director of Press Freedom, director of the Press Institute, and assistant executive director of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), headquartered in Miami, Florida.  Among his responsibilities, Trotti manages journalism investigation projects, such as the Unpunished Crimes Against Journalists Program, and monitors violations against freedom of the press in the Americas, topics on which he lectures. He organizes conferences on freedom of the press and training programs for journalists, media executives, and various publications. He also represents the IAPA on missions to inter-governmental organizations and governments. Investigates and monitors press freedom violations, and he is the publisher of a trade magazine, Hora de Cierre. He writes columns for several newspapers, and maintains a blog "Mensajes y Sociedad", in www.clarin.com. He also has an art web page: www.ricardotrotti.com. Previously, he was assistant to the editor at the Miami Herald, assistant to the publisher at El Nuevo Herald and editor-in-chief  of El LiberalTrotti writes for several specialized international publications and lectures on freedom of press and journalism.

Marcela Turati is a reporter for the Mexican magazine Proceso where she covers social issues, human rights and the impact of drug trafficking and violence. Her current assignment is Ciudad Juarez, now considered the most violence city in the world. Turati is the author of the book "Fuego Cruzada: Las Victimas Atrapadas en la Guerra del Narco," which examines the objectification and dehumanization of the war's dead, and its effects on individuals, families and communities. She is also the editor and coauthor of two other books, "Migraciones Vemos… Infancias No Sabemos," about the lives of Mexican child migrant laborers; and "La Guerra por Juarez," which chronicles three narratives of violence in different sectors of the city. She has won awards from, among others, the United Nationas Procurement Division's Millenium Development Goals in Latin America and the Caribbean and the Inter Press Service News Agency. She is a contributor to newspapers and magazines in Peru, Chile, Colombia, Uruguay, Ecuador and the U.S. Turati is co-founder and member of the board of directors of the On-the-Ground Journalists network, which is dedicated to training Mexican journalists.

Pablo Corral Vega is an Ecuadorian constitutional lawyer and photojournalist whose work has been published in National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, the Smithsonian Magazine, the New York Times Sunday magazine, Audubon, the French, German, Spanish, and Russian editions of Geo, and other international publications. He is the creator and editor of Nuestra Mirada, the largest online network for photojournalists in Latin America. His work has been exhibited in Perpignan, Quito, Guayaquil, Cuenca, Tokyo, Seville, Washington, D.C., and Houston, and he has published six books of photography including “Ecuador, Andes and Twenty Five,” published by the National Geographic Society, in which famed Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa wrote twenty short stories inspired by the photos.

Leonardo Vivas is currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and coordinator of the Center’s Latin American Initiative. He is a sociologist from the Central University in Venezuela, with an M.Phil from University of Sussex, UK, and a PhD from Nanterre Université in Paris. He currently teaches Latin American politics at UMass-Lowell. He founded and for several years has led Latin Roots, an organization devoted to Latino Culture and Education in Massachusetts. Viva has been a fellow and associate researcher at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and at Tufts University, he taught a course about the Chavez era in Venezuela. In Venezuela, he was director of industry in the Development Ministry and founder of several nonprofit organizations. Vivas has published two books about Venezuela’s political crises and co-edited another about grass roots management. He writes for the media both in the Boston area and in Venezuela.