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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In large South Florida Jamaican communities like Lauderhill's, the urgent drive to collect and ship Hurricane Melissa relief aid to their devastated island goes on alongside the frustrating effort to communicate with loved ones there. -
COMMENTARY Trinidad and Tobago's Persad-Bissessar should be applauded for steering away from Venezuela's Maduro — but questioned for steering into Trump's potential legal whirlpool. -
The 185 mph winds that Melissa packed on landfall made it the most powerful recorded hurricane to ever hit Jamaica — challenging the mettle of the island's most storm-hardened denizens. -
The heavenly, rum-soaked fruit confection called black cake is arguably the most important food fixture of any Caribbean Christmas celebration. -
From Sucre to South Florida, Venezuelans have mixed feelings about whether a threatened U.S. military incursion against drug traffickers will affect their desperate situation — and their brutal dictatorship. -
The annual Fulbright fellows gathering will be held for the first time in Miami this week — hoping to help reverse the U.S.'s pullback from influential international exchange programs. -
Colombia's leftist President Gustavo Petro is decidedly unpopular in the country and its South Florida diaspora — but President Trump also risks backlash there and here if he carries out his aid and tariff threats. -
COMMENTARY María Corina Machado deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for leading Venezuela's nonviolent democracy movement — but to succeed, should that effort rely on a U.S. military incursion? -
Venezuelan democracy champion María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, but on Monday Cuban exiles — who see Venezuela's struggle intertwined with Cuba's — recounted the big part they played in nominating her from Miami. -
José Daniel Ferrer is founder of the dissident Patriotic Union of Cuba, or UNPACU. He was arrested during the historic mass protests against the regime in July of 2021, and he’d since been in prison in Santiago. -
Friday's announcement that Venezuelan democracy champion María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize also lifts a diaspora facing deportations in the U.S. as well as a brutal regime at home. -
A new UNICEF report found that the resulting infrastructure breakdown has led to food scarcity, meaning almost 300,000 Haitian children under age 5 will suffer malnutrition this year.
