Award-winning retired AP journalist Harold Olmos useless at 78
Award-winning Bolivian journalist Harold Olmos, whose gentlemanly fashion belied a exceptional reportorial tenacity and who led Involved Press operations in Venezuela and Brazil right after fleeing his coup-convulsed homeland extra than 4 many years in the past, has died at age 78.
Olmos died Wednesday in the eastern lowlands town of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, of a heart attack immediately after a extensive illness, stated his son, José Olmos. He said his father experienced struggled with diabetes.
The journalist, a job model for young colleagues with deep practical experience covering navy difficulties to democracy, had returned to his indigenous country in 2006 after retiring from the AP. He launched a 2nd job as a columnist, educator and creator when Evo Morales, a leftist coca-growers’ union leader embraced by the country’s indigenous greater part, began to dominate Bolivian politics.
“He experienced incredibly robust and community viewpoints,” his son mentioned, particularly about what he regarded to be an assault on push freedom by Morales’ governing MAS motion.
Olmos joined the AP in 1969 in La Paz, Bolivia, at age 25, after operating as a weekend editor at the Presencia day-to-day. An interior business memo the upcoming yr explained the young reporter functioning three blocks to the presidential palace throughout Bolivian coup attempt No. 187 to report on the strafing of the presidential palace for a story that “had no competition” on U.S. front internet pages.
Olmos was bureau chief in Venezuela for additional than a 10 years till 1993 — decades of tumult that saw Hugo Chavez rise to prominence — then in Brazil right until his retirement in 2006.
Claude Erbsen, retired former director of Environment Solutions for the AP, claimed Olmos excelled in serving to drop light on Brazil’s changeover from armed forces dictatorship to vibrant democracy. But he and other people had been most amazed by both Olmos’ disarming gentility and fearlessness.
“I believe the most significant characteristic in him was that he was definitely a light soul, but when he sank his teeth into something you couldn’t beat him off with a two-by-4,” explained Erbsen.
Olmos would display that tenacity in his afterwards years as a blogger and columnist for El Deber, just one of Bolivia’s top newspapers. In a four-year challenge that ended with the 2017 publication of a reserve, “Etched in Memory: Notes of a Reporter,” Olmos examined a lethal 2009 governing administration raid that claimed the lives of a few foreigners allegedly involved in a terrorist plot in opposition to then-President Morales. 10 men and women put in concerning six and 10 a long time in jail for alleged participation, only to regain liberty when prices ended up dropped in 2020. Olmos attended just about every courtroom listening to.
Olmos was “a journalist like few some others,” explained Nestor Ikeda, a former AP author and editor who labored with him in Ikeda’s native Peru. Olmos was pressured to flee there after one of the multiple coups that then produced Bolivia synonymous with political instability.
“He was often at the big information situations, as a journalist and often a protagonist,” Ikeda reported.
Olmos’ friendship with Lidia Guelier, Bolivia’s first female president, experienced compelled him to clandestinely flee the wrath of Gen. Luis Garcia Meza, the leader of a 1980 coup, Ikeda said.
In Lima, Olmos invited Ikeda to a key assembly with Bolivian opposition activist Jaime Paz Zamora, whose face and head were being wrapped in bandages from a airplane crash, later established to have been plotted by Garcia Meza’s govt. Paz Zamora experienced been the sole survivor.
“Harold and Paz Zamora embraced with the intensity of a reunion of two brothers immersed in the identical tragedy,” Ikeda explained. In 1989, Paz Zamora would be elected Bolivia’s president.
Olmos became bureau chief in Caracas in 1982. AP reporter Jorge Rueda remembered him as “a maestro for many generations” of AP journalists and “the rock that supported us all in tricky coverages which include the 1989 road protests and rioting that arrived to be known as ‘The Caracazo.’” Additional than 300 individuals died in the violence triggered mainly by gasoline and transport price increases. Olmos also anchored protection of the failed 1992 coup led by then-Lt. Col. Chavez, whom Venezuelans would afterwards elect president.
Olmos, “understanding South American political actuality and the region’s militarism, was among the the initial to alert that Venezuela experienced opened a Pandora’s box by employing soldiers to repress protests through the Caracazo,” explained Rueda. “After that it would be complicated to make them return to their barracks.”
Born in the Amazonian city of Riberalta, Olmos was educated at the University of San Andres in La Paz and the College of Social Reports in Rome.
An AP inside publication at the time of his using the services of, picturing him with a mop of black hair, explained “English is even now a wrestle for him, but he is coming together.”
Olmos’ English was nearly impeccable.
In 2007, he was awarded Bolivia’s Countrywide Journalism Prize.
On acquiring it, Olmos claimed that “I remaining a place enchained by an implacable dictatorship and returned to one gripped by opposing sights. In this realm exactly where journalism is trapped in the crossfire of political and ideological disputes it seems the journalist can be deemed the enemy.”
Olmos is survived by his wife Cristina, daughter Paula and son José.
___
Bajak was the AP’s Chief of Andean News from 2006-2016.
___
Related Push reporters Carlos Valdez and Paola Flores in La Paz, Bolivia, contributed to this report.