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
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American Airlines will begin flights between Miami and Caracas again on April 30 — while Venezuelans and non-Venezuelans alike navigate Venezuelan passport and visa processes that many expats say have improved, online, since the U.S. ousted dictator Nicolás Maduro in January. -
The Miami Herald poll of South Florida Cubans shows 79% support some sort of U.S. military intervention to bring regime change or humanitarian relief in Cuba. -
COMMENTARY Pope Leo XIV has every right to criticize President Trump's Iran war and immigration policies. But that doesn't mean, as so many are asserting, that no one has the right to criticize the Pope. -
More than two-thirds of U.S. Latino voters disapprove of President Trump in a national survey by FIU's Latino Public Opinion Forum — portending the swing bloc's significant return to the Democrats after pivoting to the GOP in 2024. Florida, though, was the poll's outlier. -
The De Grazia brothers were ordered freed from Venezuela's brutal Rodeo I prison, where they've spent two years with no due process — but a warden's refusal to release them raises doubts that President Trump's favored regime faction is "running" the country. -
COMMENTARY Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is 80 and running for re-election, an egotistical move that may open the door to another reactionary Bolsonaro presidency — this time the son's. -
COMMENTARY President Trump's Supreme Court intimidation bid on birthright citizenship risks reminding the justices — and the world — of the Dominican Republic's thuggish repeal of jus soli 13 years ago. -
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."
