Ken Dermota Memorial

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

When I started working at AFP in Washington five years ago, I knew that the man sipping on yerba mate from a traditional gourd would be my source for answers on stories from South America.

Indeed, Ken would take time between sips of his drink (he had boxes of this stuff stored in the office's kitchen) to answer my questions about the origins of the conflict in Colombia and the Pinochet era in Chile.

Despite the furious pace of a 24-hour news operation, Ken was always happy to help, and for that I will always remember him. But while I knew Ken the journalist, I wish I had gotten to known Ken the family man better. His eyes would brighten every time he talked about his son Eddie and his wife Beatriz Elena. He also had a sincere, hearty laugh that would boom through the boredom of a long Saturday afternoon spent in front of a computer at work.

My toughts are with Beatriz Elena and Eddie.

Laurent Thomet - AFP - Paris

1 comment:

Jan Thomas JohnsonJune 1, 2009 at 7:06 PM
The time was brief, but I consider it a privilege and honor to have worked alongside Ken. The words "gentleman and scholar" were indisputably coined for such a generous, gentle and talented man. Our whole world -- not just the world of journalism -- is richer for his presence in it. Jan Johnson
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Journalist, union organizer Ken Dermota dead at 53

WASHNGTON - Ken Dermota, a journalist, union organizer, radio show host and teacher, died in Washington on May 11 after a long battle with cancer. He was 53.

During an unconventional life spanning North and South America, Ken investigated media bias against the Mapuche Indians of Chile, helped start a human rights group in Colombia, and skillfully handled plumbing problems at his Capitol Hill home.

His 2002 work on the deterioration of press freedoms in the decade following Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, became a best-seller in Chile.

“Never has there been such an investigation of the press, no study so complete,” Enrique Correa, a cabinet minister in the 1990-1994 post- Pinochet government of president Patricio Aylwin, wrote of the book, “And Well Tied Down: Chile's Press Under Democracy.”

“It will prove itself to be a transcendent, enduring work that will be quoted and consulted.”

Kenneth John Dermota was born February 5, 1956 in York, Pennsylvania, the son of an upholsterer and a housekeeper. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Antioch College, a bastion of liberalism and student activism in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Ken was an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in New York for a decade before moving to Colombia in 1990 to work as a free-lance journalist.
His clients included Business Week, the Christian Science Monitor, The Boston Globe, the (Toronto) Globe and Mail, French newspaper Le Monde, National Public Radio and NBC Radio. He extensively covered the drug war at the time, and was the only foreign reporter to interview drug lord Pablo Escobar in prison.

In 1994, Ken -- by then president of Bogota’s Foreign Press Association – met his future wife, Colombian lawyer Beatriz Elena Leon, while covering a political event.

She credits his organizing savvy and community connections for her appointment, a year later, as mayor of the Bogota municipality of Usaquen.

The couple moved in 1996 to Washington where Ken worked for NBC radio and enrolled at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), earning a master’s degree in Latin American affairs.

Armed with a Knight International Journalism Fellowship, he spent a year in Chile, teaching journalism at the Universidad de Chile and the Universidad Diego Portales.

Complaints from his students and dozens of journalists he interviewed led Ken to investigate the lack of access to public records and even basic information such as media ownership.
The fruit of this research, in addition to “Tied Down” (“Chile Inedito” in Spanish), was an 80-page manual for investigative journalists in Chile, published by the Universidad de Chile.

Ken joined the Washington bureau of Agence France-Presse in November 2001. He traveled to Caracas for AFP to cover the 47-hour coup against President Hugo Chavez in April 2002. His stories out of Washington included the April 2007 case of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called D.C. Madam, who ran a prostitution ring patronized by Washington elite. He also taught journalism at the American and Howard universities in Washington D.C.

One of Ken’s final articles, “Snow Fall,” on the failed U.S. war on drugs, appeared in the July-August 2007 edition of “The Atlantic” magazine and sparked lively debate on several specialty websites on US drug policies.

A music lover with sophisticated tastes and an extensive collection, Ken hosted a weekly two-hour jazz show on Colombian radio as well as the country’s only radio news show in English at the time.

The idea for what eventually became the Red Nacional de Iniciativas por la Paz y contra la Guerra (REDEPAZ), one of Colombia’s leading Human Rights organizations, began over drinks at Ken’s apartment in a Bohemian neighborhood of Bogota.

At home in Washington, he was a motorcycle enthusiast, an avid cook, an accomplished handyman, and a doting father who cherished hiking with his son Eddie.

Yet he still made time for writing projects, including an unpublished futuristic work of fiction about a world without money.

Ken is survived by his wife Beatriz Elena; their eight-year-old son Eddie; and his older brother Ralph Dermota of York, Pennsylvania.

A previous marriage to Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo ended in divorce.

In lieu of flowers Beatriz Elena asks that donations be made in Ken’s name to the Two Rivers Public Charter School of Washington, where Eddie is a student.

ch/ksb

Two Rivers Pulic School es
1227 4th St. NE
Washington DC 20002

www.tworiverspcs.org

Ken Dermota Memorial

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

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Journalist, union organizer Ken Dermota dead at 53

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