Poder360°

“I have no sympathy for Jose Antonio Vargas. He is a discredit to his profession, and a drag on many of his former colleagues. By lying to friends, colleagues, and employers, he’s made an already tough job—that of being an ethnic journalist—more difficult…Journalists are perplexed about what should happen to Vargas now. It’s not a hard question. He’s undocumented, and thus subject to deportation like any other illegal immigrant. What are we supposed to do? Grant him a special dispensation because he’s a journalist and not a janitor? Treat him better than we treat many others because he speaks English and has a soapbox? That’s not what this country is about.

“And, I bet, it wouldn’t mesh with why Vargas chose to become a journalist in the first place. Most of us get into this business to give voice to the weak and vulnerable, not to use our influence to claim special privileges that those people would never be afforded.”

—Ruben Navarrette—Syndicated Column, July 2011

Those are harsh words. I didn’t expect to have to eat them.

Journalists are a blend of public and private. We put our words out to be seen by strangers. But then some of us are able to retreat into anonymity. We don’t expect for our subject to chase us home.

So when Jose Antonio Vargas, a 31-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the most famous illegal immigrants in the country, responded to the column I’d written about him by “friending” me on Facebook, and then suggested we talk, I felt both excitement and dread.

Vargas started our conversation by saying that, when he was in high school and college, he used to read my columns because my last name N-A-V-A-R-R-E-T-T-E called out to him. It’s a popular name in the Philippines, where Vargas was born and from which he immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s. He felt a connection. That’s why my criticism stung.

“A lot of things are written,” he told me. “I have thick skin. I’m a journalist. I’m used to being corrected. That’s not it. I was only frustrated and hurt by (the column) because I respect you. And so I wanted to talk to you about it.”

I listened as Vargas explained how he’d come here at the age of 12 with a fake passport that had a student visa, how there was no line to come legally, how after years of living a lie with co-conspirators he calls his “underground railroad” all he wants now is to bring truth to the immigration debate.

“As journalists, we have so many things to cover, so much information, so many things to do,” he said. “But collectively, I do not think that we as journalists have told the complete immigration story. People say I’m an advocate, an activist. As far as I’m concerned I’m a journalist who is trying to tell the fullest story I possibly can.”

For the last 20 years, I’ve tried to do the same thing. And yet, I have a blind spot. It comes not from what I know or don’t know, but from what I am: a U.S. citizen whose family goes back at least five generations in the United States. I still don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to be an immigrant—let alone, an illegal immigrant. That’s why I wanted to talk to Vargas. But why did he want to talk to me?

“You are in the unique position to talk about me as a journalist,” he said. “There are times that I wish I wasn’t this person, that I was just reporting on this person. It would make it easier. I do think I am a pretty good journalist, and it’s my job to tell the whole immigration story and report the hell out of it. And part of that is asking myself the hard questions like: Why haven’t I been arrested and deported?”

As Vargas sees it, his story is just a footnote. “We haven’t even gone through the first chapter of the immigration discussion,” he said. “We’re still on the introduction of the book. People focus so much on the fact that I don’t have my papers, and they never ask the why and the how. Why is this happening? How is this happening? As a journalist, that’s what I’m most interested in.”

What I’m interested in, I explained, was whether I screwed up the column I wrote about him. The more he talks, the more I think I did. The point of that column was simple: Of course, the Pulitzer-prize winning journalist should be deported. How do we say that he shouldn’t be while we’re trying to deport the gardener, the nanny, or the avocado picker? But now, I realize, nothing about this story is simple.

“From talking to you,” I said, “and from watching you over the last year, I do admire a lot of what you’re doing and the way you carry yourself—the strength, courage, and poise. But I have a huge blind spot, and it’s the same one that most U.S. citizens have. We don’t understand this life. We can’t put ourselves in your shoes. And so when you lie or cut corners we can very easily judge you because we have the luxury of doing that.”

“Wow,” he said. “What you just said right there. I don’t want to have to call it ‘entitlement.’ But people don’t realize their privilege or how lucky they are. Again, they call us advocates. We are merely advocating to be seen as full human beings.”

Part of the advocacy is Define American, a new organization that Vargas founded to help elevate the immigration debate and find new solutions to the stalemate.

“I believe our history is each other,” he said. “That is our only guide. If we do not tell stories, and we do not connect the dots, and if we fail to see ourselves in other people....”

His voice trailed off. He choked up. He never finished the sentence. But you get the point. If we fail to see ourselves in other people, then we’re lost or we have no hope or we’ve lost our humanity. Take your pick. Either way, he’s right.

I am often too hard on illegal immigrants and too judgmental about what they have to do to survive. While I still believe that Americans need to hold lawbreakers accountable, I also believe that we shouldn’t be naive about the impossibility of an immigration system that the native-born can’t relate to. I also believe that humility is a good thing, not just on the part of illegal immigrants who should worry less about getting their demands met and more about getting right with the law but also on the part of U.S. citizens who should spend more time fixing the immigration system and less time criticizing illegal immigrants who squeak by it.

There, I said it. Twenty years of writing about this issue, and this epiphany finally comes. Thanks to a new friend and fellow journalist intent on telling the whole story—and getting the rest of us to do the same.

One day before the course of Venezuela’s history will change dramatically, conversation in the newsroom of Diario Las Americas—newly acquired by Hugo Chavez’s avowed “No. 1 enemy”—is more about reaching a wider, younger audience and less about political skirmishes with the soon-to-expire Bolivarian strongman.

But the parties involved have no idea about the drastic upheaval the world of Venezuelan media is about to undergo during the next week; nor are they privy to the unique position the Miami-based broadsheet will occupy when the dust settles.

As the paper’s freshly installed editorial director, Manuel Aguilera, 45, is trying to drag the venerable afternoon daily into the 21st century. The paper was bought in January by a group of Venezuelan investors led by the controversial banking and media mogul Nelson Mezerhane—an exiled stakeholder in Venezuela’s most vocal independent news channel who early ran afoul of Chavez. The Caracas-based newspaper El Nacional is a minority investor in the deal and will play a role as a strategic content partner.

From his Brickell office, Aguilera explains how South Florida’s first Spanish language paper must broaden its horizons to net new demographics or risk falling into irrelevance as its conservative readership ages.

“This new generation is very connected, so obviously we must connect with them across the platforms they choose to use,” Aguilera says. “They still care about the news and want to read the news—just like their parents, grandparents—but they do it differently.” This has been a standard mantra for print media executives for more than a decade, but Aguilera’s adoption of it on behalf of Diario represents a tectonic shift. Before the Mezerhane buy installed Aguilera and moved the newsroom from its longtime central Miami-Dade offices to Brickell, the paper clung to a model whose era was more Hearst-Pulitzer than Jobs-Zuckerberg.

Diario was late to the digital game, only launching a website in 2006. Like most other Spanish language newspapers, it lagged behind in digital innovations and content offerings. It struggled to adapt to online publishing. And those living in countries with limited press freedoms, such as Venezuela—who most needed its voice—had limited access to it. Aguilera was brought in to change that. Political questions Diario, founded by Nicaraguan exile brothers in 1953, is renowned for its conservative editorial stance. The question is whether that will continue under the new owner, or change with the aim of drawing a younger, arguably less hardline audience. With the emboldened efforts to silence media critical of Chavismo following the iconic leader’s death, might Mezerhane want to use the platform to advocate his own pro-commerce, anti-communist political views? Aguilera dismisses that theory as untrue.

“We are just one of Mr. Mezerhane’s many properties; he’s acquired something like 17 in the past year,” Aguilera says. To be sure, Mezerhane is none too pleased with the developments back home since his archrival’s demise. On March 11, six days after Chavez’s death, it was announced that the controlling majority interest in Globovision—of which Mezerhane had a disputed stake but was now owned by Guillermo Zuloaga—would be sold to government interests, effectively silencing the last significant dissenting voice in the Venezuelan media. Mezerhane, a former partner in Corporaćion GV Inversiones, the parent company of Globovision, which is hugely popular among anti-Chavistas, was reportedly furious over the sale. The government maintains that Mezerhane had forfeited his 20 percent ownership as part of the 2010 nationalization of his bank.

“Nelson is quite upset with the sale of Globovision and he’d like to distance himself from it,” Aguilera wrote by email the day the deal was announced. The Diario story that ran that day quoted an attorney for Zuloaga, who said the sale did not include Mezerhane’s stake because “three years ago the government confiscated Nelson Mezerhane’s shares and he has, at this time, an action against the Republic of Venezuela in the American courts to vindicate his rights and maintain his shares.”

But if recent events are any indication, Mezerhane may be ready to turn aside from Venezuelan media altogether—at least for now. His associate in Miami, Camilo Aguiar, confirms that “as long as the political situation remains in Venezuela I don’t see any opportunity to invest down there.”

With few remaining compatriots in his homeland’s mediasphere, Diario Las Americas may be one of Mezerhane’s few remaining weapons he can deploy to harry the socialist regime and continue his anti-Chavez agenda. But to understand how that can be accomplished, it is important to understand Diario. A Miami Institution Horacio Aguirre Baca and his brother Francisco founded Diario after their family was driven out of their home country by the Anastasio Somoza regime. Although there were fewer than 10,000 Hispanics in Miami at the time, in subsequent decades the Aguirres fostered a newspaper that became more than a media outlet to its readers.

By connecting with the ever-growing Spanish-speaking readership, the paper established itself as an indispensable and trusted news source for the latest headlines from “back home,” wherever home might be.

“You do see much more subjective opinionating throughout content—and not just in the editorial pages,” says Moses Shumow, assistant professor of journalism at Florida International University.

“They are much more militant, very conservative, aimed at right-wing Cuban Americans, which is their readership,” adds Alejandro Alvarado, Shumow’s colleague and director of the Hispanic Media Futures Program at FIU.

It didn’t hurt that the Aguirres’ politics, staunchly conservative as they are, appealed to the Cuban exile community and later struck a resonant chord with Venezuelans leaving Chavez’s Venezuela.

The Diario editorial pages, run by Horacio Aguirre’s daughter, Helen Aguirre Ferre, took strongly anti-Castro and anti-Chavez positions. In 2009, as leftist Honduran president Manuel Zelaya tried to cling to power by altering the country’s constitution, Diario used its considerable influence to harshly criticize his administration and support the subsequent military coup that ousted him.

With little fanfare, Mezerhane took ownership of the Miami institution. Analysts estimated that the deal is in the neighborhood of $50 million. The sale may have stunned outsiders, but media analysts were not surprised. The paper has maintained a healthy-if-flagging circulation that has fared well during the print news droughts in recent years even as its English language counterparts suffered monumental revenue losses.

Still, there were problems. As reported by El Nuevo Herald, the paper owed back wages to a group of distributors, among other debts. “Diario was in urgent need of investment,” says Alvarado.

Industry analysts believe the paper had been on the block probably since the summer of 2012. A bid from Argentinian media mogul Daniel Hadad reached an impasse months before the Mezerhane deal materialized, so there was at least one other suitor The decision to sell Diario was not easy, but it was the right one, according to Aguirre Ferre, who now works as a conservative journalist at Univision while continuing, for now, her duties at the family business.

“I can speak for myself and say it was clear that the business model for print media had changed dramatically and it needed something we weren’t able to provide,” she says. “In that sense, you feel sad that you couldn’t provide all that it needed, but on the other hand we’re delighted that there’s a group who understands the dream behind Diario Las Americas.” Finding a Home in South Florida Nelson Mezerhane is not your typical media mogul. He’s been imprisoned, strong-armed, threatened, offered (and refused) bribes, and, now, exiled. His business has been jeopardized and his bank was one of a group of private businesses taken in a wave by the Chavez government. Such is life when you own the only independent news channel in Venezuela, where press freedom is routinely trampled if reporting is contrary to the socialist party line. Mezerhane did not respond to interview requests for this story, but his history as a Chavez opponent is well documented.

Exiled in the United States since 2009, Mezerhane filed a $1 billion lawsuit on Nov. 4, 2011 accusing the government in Venezuela of illegally appropriating Banco Federal, a Mezerhane investment. The 124-page lawsuit alleged that Chavez targeted the bank only after Mezerhane refused to cede his ownership stake in Globovision, which relentlessly criticized the Chavez regime.

In 2010 the Venezuela government applied for an international arrest warrant to bring Mezerhane home to answer charges of corruption and embezzlement, accusing him of stealing from his own bank before it was nationalized. So-called Red Notices, INTERPOL lingo for international assistance requests in obtaining arrest warrants, are taken with a grain of salt when filed by Venezuela. The intergovernmental organization in 2010 came to the conclusion that some 40 percent of these requests would be dropped because “the ongoing investigation against the bankers is directly related to political persecution.” Mezerhane’s Red Notice was among those suspended, infuriating Venezuela Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz.

For his part, Mezerhane calls the charges “a smear campaign” by powerful political forces aligned with the Chavez regime. That “campaign” washed up on American shores last year when Mezerhane and Banco Federal’s former CEO Rogelio Trujillo were accused in a Miami court by Publicidad Vepaco, an advertising company in Venezuela, and LaTele Television of embezzling their investment. The parties had consummated a deal in Curacao for the two companies to convert their Bolivars to T-bills, but in the disarray that was the nationalization of the bank, Mezerhane absconded with the cash, the plaintiffs contend.

“The Venezuelan government has filed criminal charges against defendant Mezerhane for masterminding a criminal enterprise that successfully looted Federal of hundreds of millions of dollars of other people’s monies to pay for a gilded exile and an army of lawyers to hide and keep stolen money,” their complaint said.

The court ruled that Miami was not a suitable venue, and the plaintiffs are planning to appeal. Mezerhane and the Aguirre family are clearly kindred spirits. In 2010, as Chavez cracked down on his enemies in the press and threatened to take over and shutter Globovision using executive power, Diario came to the channel’s defense in its opinion pages, writing in a Dec. 14 editorial that “Chavez wants to use these executive decrees, made immediately into laws, to govern the operation of television stations in Venezuela and limit cable broadcasts. The main objective of this law would be to close Globovision, through a maneuver that is totally incompatible with democracy.”

Mezerhane now lives in Boca Raton, but former colleagues and GV employees in Venezuela say he remains staunchly pro-market and anti-Chavez. Still, sources say it will take more than Chavez’s death to clear a path for Mezerhane to return to Venezuela. From his new home in South Florida, with his newest media property, Mezerhane has in Diario what could be a particularly potent channel to affect conversation in Venezuela. A new regime Since 1990, Alejandro Aguirre, Horacio’s son and the scion of the Aguirre family media empire, had been Diario’s publisher and deputy editor. Aguirre stepped down in December, ceding control to new editorial director Manuel Aguilera. Before joining Diario, Aguilera was director of news at Univision Interactive Media, and previously he was an editor at El Mundo Americas, a Spanish newspaper.

Now, Aguilera must modernize a paper that has a lot of catching up to do to match its competition in the digital world. Still, Aguilera says Diario has strengths the others lack. “The goal for us is to turn Diario Las Americas into the premier newspaper in South Florida,” says Aguilera, who believes his competitors at El Nuevo Herald lack strong ties with the community. The new editorial regime has begun development of a new and expanded Web presence and plans to incorporate other digital initiatives in the coming year.

But they have their work cut out for them. Diario’s circulation is at 33,000, down from about 63,000 in 2010. Dun & Bradstreet pegs its 2012 earnings at $8.4 million, and while those revenues have mostly kept pace going back as far as five years, operating expenses associated with daily printing become less and less cost effective as journalism continues its slog to the digital domain. Aguilera’s job is to ensure that Diario is in a position to survive that paradigm shift while not losing sight of its prime readership.

Miami Beach-based information design firm Cases i Associats has been hired to overhaul the somewhat stodgy brand and content delivery. Alvarado and other experts contend it’s a change long overdue.

“The publication has been growing older through the years and so has its readership. They needed to be able to adapt to a new era of digital,” he says. An Emerging Trend The deal is one of a number of transactions that finds profitable Hispanic American media outlets being bought by South American interests, in part because the medium has exhibited staying power among Spanish-speaking readership. Last year, New York-based impreMedia—publishers of La Opinión and El Diario—was bought by US Hispanic Media Inc., a subsidiary of Argentinian conglomerate S.A. La Nación. The goal of the deal was to modernize print-heavy properties and leverage their brand equity to refocus on digital platforms.

“It is exactly the same model as impreMedia,” Alvarado says, pointing out the similarities with Mezerhane’s plans for Diario. Aguilera confirms, “We will be modernizing how we interact with our readership. We’ll be changing a lot about the way we do things.”