Mike Leffert
mike@ladb.unm.edu
Mike Leffert, a staff writer at LADB since 2002, is responsible for planning and writing NotiCen, covering Central America, and the Caribbean, including Cuba.
He has 16 years experience as a journalist in tv, radio and print writing about Central America. In the 1990s he was a partner and producer for Latin America News and Entertainment (LANE) in Nicaragua, where he produced independent TV news and features under contract to Italian TV Channel 3, and sold features and news footage to US media. He also wrote and produced pieces in Guatemala for Pacifica, NPR, CBC and Monitor radio.From 1990 to 2000 Mr. Leffert worked in Central America writing news pieces for Time Magazine, AP, Knight-Ridder, and feature writing for magazines and newspapers in the US and Norway. He has also written for AP and Reuters.
Mr. Leffert served as president of the foreign press club in Guatemala. While in Guatemala, Mr. Leffert produced a newsletter, Volver, that reported on issues directly related to the internal war, and issues having to do with Guatemalan refugees, their conditions in the camps in Mexico and Honduras, and their return to Guatemala. Volver was an outgrowth of another project, the Guatemala Information Project (GIP) on which Mr. Leffert worked with a partner wholly within Guatemala. This involved obtaining non-public information, writing reports, to provide data and documentation for use in the negotiations on the peace accords, which ended the war in December of 1996.
