Monday, February 26, 2007. Ginger Thompson. "Leadership in the Media."

MS. FORD: Good morning, everyone. I hope you all enjoyed a little extra sleep and some good exercise. We're ready to start with a great program. Following our speaker this morning -- who is, incidentally, on a very tight schedule so that's one reason that we want to get going -- Bruce will have a series of announcements for you. In the meantime, to get us going this morning, Brad will introduce our guest speaker.

MR. LYMAN: Thank you, Burch, very much. It really was quite nice to sleep in until 5:15 this morning. Welcome to what I think will be a wonderful couple of days here at this beautiful hotel. The weather is perfect and I think our lineup of speakers in the next couple of days you'll find very stimulating.

It's my distinct pleasure today to introduce to you a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the New York Times, Ms. Ginger Thompson. For those of you who regularly read the Times, Ms. Thompson's byline is quite familiar. Her insightful, poignant, and thought-provoking stories about Central and South America, among other things, have earned her a reputation for tackling some of toughest issues facing the US and our Central and South American neighbors.

Now, to make Ginger feel at home, I called the hotel and I said, "I want you to get rid of all those USA Todays you normally put out in front of the rooms and put the Times out there for everybody." So just to make Ginger feel at home, we have the New York Times. Of course, I made that up.

Let me read you a little bit about Ginger. Ms. Thompson shared a Pulitzer in 2000 for a New York Times series entitled "Race in America," and was a recipient of Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Prize for her reporting on Latin America. This is the quotation from the Prize citation. "For nearly 15 years, New York Times Mexico bureau chief Ginger Thompson has been indispensable reading for those who want to understand the intimate and sometimes painful relationship between the United States and its near neighbors of Mexico, Central America, and Haiti. In an era when US reporters are finding less and less space for news about Latin America, Thompson has demonstrated that there is not a more compelling way to draw attention to important issues than through the eyes of her real-life subjects. From her base in Mexico, her reporting has spread far and wide. Her piercing curiosity and keen sense of human rights have produced unusually dramatic and tightly woven stories on US-backed death squads in Central America, the mysterious disappearances and murders of women on the US-Mexican border, anarchy in Haiti, the growing threat of US-based Latino gangs in Central America, and the pathetic plight of smuggled illegal aliens making their way to the United States in dangerous sea voyages, just to mention a few."

She's currently on sabbatical. Her last story was from Cuba, and I had the wonderful chance to share breakfast with Ginger, and hear how she snuck into Cuba and was escorted out by the Cuban police. But maybe she can tell you about that.

I'd also like to thank my brother Rick, who is the book and theater editor for the Times, for suggesting Ms. Thompson -- so Rick owes you one, Ginger -- as the ideal person for this conference. And I really couldn't agree more.

Now, we were able to grab a quote from the New York Times intranet, as well. This is what they had to say about you. "With the current academic year, Ginger Thompson, who has been our wonderfully incisive and energetic bureau chief in Mexico City for the last six years, starts a year apart from the Times to pursue a master's degree in international affairs as a J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Fellow at George Washington University. Though her talents we'll miss for the time being, the scholarship will allow her to take a well-deserved break and spend an academic year in Washington, and summer at the New College of Oxford. Her focus will be human rights, law, and Islam."

Most recently Ginger won the Cabot Award, as I mentioned, and she pursued her singular passion, bringing readers sweeping and extraordinary human coverage of her region. Some of her best work included cross-border pieces on youth gangs that I mentioned, and the perilous journey of immigrants, and really the whole question of leadership in Central and South America.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's my distinct pleasure to introduce Ms. Ginger Thompson.

MS. THOMPSON: Wow. Leave it to a teacher to do his homework. I really appreciate that, Brad. I want to thank you, I want to thank Bruce, and I want to thank the National Association of Principals of Schools for Girls for inviting me here today. I do owe Rick one, not the other way around.

Good morning. As a striving African-American woman, I identify very strongly with the issues and struggles that gave rise to this organization. My own entry to journalism was once helped by affirmative action and nearly blocked by chauvinism. It's an experience that continues to inspire me. It happened in May 1988. I had majored in journalism at Purdue University, but since Purdue is best known for producing engineers and not journalists, I had a hard time finding a good newspaper job after I graduated. I was working as a public relations assistant at the National Football League for Peter Rozelle.

I hated it. Don't get me wrong. I was just as boy-crazy as any normal single 23-year-old woman at the time, and there was no better way to meet girl-crazy guys. But frankly, the job left me feeling a little like I was living on the sidelines. My dreams were to get as close as possible to people who were changing the world and maybe become one of them. With all due respect to the amazing people I worked with at the NFL, I didn't think I would find what I was looking for on the football field.

So all the while I was writing speeches and press releases about the game of the week, I was looking for a lucky break into newspapers. And one day the Los Angeles Times called. They had an internship program for minority college graduates that was part of an effort to diversify their newsroom. I did so well on the writing and reporting test that I went into the interview phase of the selection process as the number one candidate for ten available slots. But by the time the interview was over, I had barely made it, and was picked number 10.

According to the three women on the panel, my drop in the rankings didn't have anything to do with what I said during the interviews. The women said that everyone on the panel thought that I was poised and articulate, and that I asked good questions. But after taking a look at me, dressed, I admit, in a suit more appropriate for cocktails than press conferences, the seven men on the panel had doubts about my grit. In other words, the women told me the men thought I was too prissy to be a reporter. The women on the panel were so outraged they threatened to quit the internship program and to make their reasons public if I were not admitted.

Now, I'm pretty persistent when I set my mind to something, and I suspect that I would have found some other way to achieve my dreams if I had not gotten into the LA Times. But I will always appreciate the three women on that interview panel. Because they believed in me, I became the most successful intern in my class, and because they believed in me, I have won or been a finalist for the more important prizes in my field. And because of the seven men on the panel, I have never again worn a skirt above my knee to work.

That's a long way of saying how proud I am to have been invited to speak to a group that stands against prejudice and was founded on the idea that women can succeed without being like men. I must admit, however, I feel completely intimidated about the topic about which I have been asked to speak. Leadership is something you live and that I write about. That's not just humility talking. It's my way of making clear that I do not presume to have a better firsthand understanding of leadership than you. I am a professional observer, and I am here hoping that some of you might identify or be inspired by some of what I have observed.

From my front seat to history, I'm often called to write about charismatic and courageous heads of state, the kind who take up the spotlight as soon as they step on stage: Hugo Chavez, Nelson Mandela, Vicente Fox, George W. Bush, Fidel Castro, and Pope John Paul II, the late.

I'd be happy to entertain any questions you might have about my experiences and encounters with them. However, I have also covered leaders who might not otherwise have gotten on stage at all. I would like to devote my prepared comments not to the decision-makers I have covered, but to the people I have covered who have to live with decisions handed down to them. Changing the world, I have learned, happens most frequently away from high places, led by people whose cries make evident that leadership comes as much from human nature as from money, connections, and formal education.

We are meeting in what I consider one of the most fascinating places on the planet, the United States border with Mexico. More people and merchandise cross this border legally and illegally than any other land border in the world. Each human crossing carries a new beginning and a cruel end, a memory of hardship or the prospect of progress, different ways of living and familiar dreams.

(Cell phone.)

Leave it to the journalist. I'm so sorry.

The border is neither here nor there. Not really the United States, yet not really Mexico, either. I have often used the words of Gloria Anzaldua, a well-known Chicana author. She says, "The US-Mexican border is an open wound where the third world scrapes against the first and bleeds, and before a scab forms, it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country, a border culture."

I quote people like Anzaldua, because even though I consider myself a product of border culture, the contradictions that characterize life here make it hard to find words of my own to describe it.

I grew up in a military family, so we moved around a lot, but we spent more time living on the border than anywhere else. I went to junior high and high school not far up I-10 from here in El Paso, Texas, and I came back often during the more than ten years I worked as a Latin America correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, the Chicago Tribune, and the New York Times. The Sonora Desert looks beautiful from the windows of this resort, but it's also a death trap. Temperatures can get as high as 110 degrees in the summer, and below freezing in the winter. Still, this inhospitable landscape has become the busiest gateway for undocumented immigrants to the United States. Of the 1.2 million undocumented immigrants detained in the United States last year, some 439,000 were picked up crossing this corner of the border. The desert stopped the unluckiest of the lot. Some 441 men, women, and children died crossing the border last year. More than half of them died around here.

The border's contradictions are just as dramatic where I grew up. The FBI considers El Paso, Texas, one of the safest cities in America. Ciudad Juarez, a short walk away, is the homicide capital of Mexico. There, a retired accountant turned women's activist leads a struggle for justice that has captured the attention of the world. Esther Chavez Cano is not only pushing 70, she has also pushed the Mexican government and international human rights workers to action in resolving the mysterious murders and disappearances of more than 250 women in Ciudad Juarez over the last decade. There is evidence that at least 95 of those killings were committed serial style. Authorities in Juarez largely kept quiet about the mysterious series of murders of young factory workers. Because the victims were typically young and poor, they were considered dispensable. Police not only failed to seriously investigate the murders; they blamed the women for inviting attacks. They accused the women of wearing suggestive, dare I say prissy, clothes to work.

Ms. Chavez, a white, middle-class Mexican woman with a college education headed toward a comfortable retirement, had no personal stake in this matter. She could well afford to live outside the fray. But her conscience called her to the front lines. She started a series of columns about the killings in a local newspaper. She rushed to the scenes of murders, no matter what time of day or night. She disrupted City Council meetings and public hearings. She organized the relatives of missing women into search committees that would scour the open desert in search of bodies. She organized protest marches across the city, across cross the country, and finally across the bridges that connect Mexico to the United States. International human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch took up Ms. Chavez' cause. The United States Congress passed resolutions condemning the killings and demanding that Mexico bring those responsible to justice. Hollywood joined in to support the victims. Eve Ensler and Sally Field came to Juarez, several documentaries about the killings were produced, and Jennifer Lopez has just finished a film about them.

The international pressure was particularly effective after the election in 2000 of Mexico's first opposition president, Vicente Fox. Mr. Fox was eager to prove to the world that he could end Mexico's history of corruption and establish the rule of law. And indeed, his government did more to stop the killings in Ciudad Juarez than any previous government. He established a special federal police force to investigate the crimes and to lobby on behalf of the victims. New arrests in the cases followed, and for a while, it seemed that things might get better.

But then the efforts made the matters worse. Soon people like Mrs. Chavez realized that in order to appease international demands for justice, authorities were rounding up innocent people and torturing them into false confessions. Among the victims were included an American couple of hippies whose only crime seemed to be that they sold handmade jewelry and conducted mystical cleansing ceremonies. Meanwhile, there was no pursuit of the links between the killings and powerful criminal Mafias, including drug traffickers, corrupt police, and the sons of wealthy business families known in Juarez as juniors.

Some of the cases created by police were so ridiculous that if people's lives had not really been at stake, they'd be laughable. Take the disappearance of 20-year-old Neyra Azucena. Her mother searched two years, until 2005, for her daughter. Police in 2005 arrested a cousin to Neyra Azucena. The cousin killed Neyra, police said, because he loved her and she didn't love him back. Then after arresting the cousin, police called Neyra's parents to the morgue and handed them a box of bones. Supposedly those bones belonged to their daughter. Police told Neyra's parents to bury the box without opening it, or else they would lose all legal claims to the remains.

Fortunately, Neyra's parents turned for help to Ms. Chavez. Ms. Chavez had the bones examined by an independent forensic specialist who determined that the skull was not Neyra's. In fact, it wasn't even a woman's skull. It was a man's. Suddenly Ms. Chavez found herself fighting for justice on two fronts: One on behalf of the murder victims, the other on behalf of those falsely accused.

A year and a lot of angry newspaper stories later, Ms. Chavez and Neyra's parents forced authorities to release the cousin who had been framed for the crime, along with several other scapegoats, including the American couple. In real terms, the unraveling of the cases puts Ms. Chavez and the parents of so many missing girls back at square one. The government was forced to admit that its special prosecutor had failed, and it invited a team of forensic specialists famous for their work in Argentina, Chile and Bosnia to redo exams on dozens of remains.

Still there have been signs of promise. The Mexican state of Chihuahua has established a state-of-the-art forensics lab paid for in large part by the United States. The state prosecutor in Chihuahua has made resolving the killings of women a priority, and Mexico last year adopted its first federal law against domestic violence, allowing judges to remove abusive spouses from the home, suspending their visits with children, and freezing assets to guarantee alimony payments.

As for Ms. Chavez, she has expanded her work to fight the domestic violence that contributes to the oppressive culture of Ciudad Juarez. Her Casa Amiga provides medical and legal assistance to women who need it. It also provides classes in self-defense. And two years ago, Ms. Chavez opened one of Mexico's only safe houses for women and children fleeing spousal abuse.

Unfortunately, the violence against women continues. Justice for Ciudad Juarez seems like a pipe dream. A write-up about the new Jennifer Lopez movie describes a scene in which Ms. Lopez, playing a Chicago-based reporter, asks her boss, "Who cares about killing in Mexico?"

I would argue the United States had better care. Mexico will fail to become a stable democracy if it fails to establish police departments and courts that uphold the law. The government of Mexico is in an all-out fight for its life against international crime organizations, some that smuggle drugs or weapons or people, some that murder women for sport. Which would the United States prefer to have as its neighbor? A stable democratic Mexico or a lawless haven for criminals?

In Central America, justice can seem even more elusive than in Mexico. And at the heart of Central America is Honduras. In 1991, I was standing beside a woman named Amelia McKay at the site of a clandestine cemetery outside Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. We watched as forensic specialists opened a secret grave. Inside was a skeleton wearing the same shirt her husband wore the day he disappeared nine years earlier, in 1982. It's not too much of an overstatement to call Nelson McKay's killing the dirty work of American tax dollars. The father of five, lawyer, and suspected subversive was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a secret Honduran military unit called Battalion 316. The battalion was trained and funded by the United States. Shortly after he disappeared, a family of farmers had come across Mr. McKay's body. They said Mr. McKay's hands and feet were bound, a black fluid used to remove ticks from cattle was oozing from his mouth, and afraid that the body might only bring them trouble, the farmers buried it in an unmarked grave. The recovery nine years later of Mr. McKay's body was a major triumph for his family and for the families of hundreds of victims of Battalion 316 who had been fighting to find lost loved ones.

Battalion 316 was shrouded in the secrecy of the Cold War. The Honduran government had denied it ever existed, and the United States government had denied having links to it. But relatives of the battalion's victims, led by a woman named Bertha Oliva, refused to accept the lies. During the 1980s, Honduras was the principal staging ground for America's proxy war against the former Soviet Union. While US support for the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua was well reported, as was the support for the right-wing government of El Salvador, there was little attention paid in the press to Washington's support for Honduras and Battalion 316.

During the time that the battalion was committing its crimes, the US played a dominant role in Honduras. Washington poured millions of dollars of economic and military aid into the tiny Central American country, and the two governments worked closely together on anything that remotely touched on questions of security. Members of the battalion wore plain clothes, drove unmarked vehicles, and conducted many of their illegal detentions in broad daylight. Some of its victims were likely responsible for planting bombs and robbing banks.

Many others, however, were kidnapped and killed for exercising the same liberties the United States said it was helping to defend in Latin America. There were students demonstrating for the release of political prisoners, union leaders organizing protests for fairer wages, journalists who criticized the military dominated regime, and professors demanding education for the poor.

One of the battalion's earliest victims was Tomas Nativi, husband to Bertha Oliva. Ms. Oliva recalls her husband being snatched from their bed in the middle of the night by men wearing ski masks. She went on to give birth to their child and to a movement that inspired wives and mothers of missing across the region. Ms. Oliva's rise started like most women in her predicament. She searched jails, hospitals, and morgues for her missing husband. Police often made fun of her, saying that her husband had probably run off with another woman. In recalling those times, Ms. Oliva often says, "I felt like an ant in front of an elephant."

After a while, she discovered there were enough ants for a colony. At every stop in her own search for Tomas, Ms. Oliva found dozens of other women -- wives, mothers, and grandmothers -- looking for missing relatives. Ms. Oliva decided that they would be able to cover more ground if they searched together. So she helped found a committee of the relatives of the disappeared. On the first Friday of every month, the members gathered in the central plaza of Tegucigalpa to demand that the government give them information on their missing relatives. For the protest, the women wore white scarves on their heads and carried poster-sized photos of lost loved ones.

Government officials ignored their demands for more than a decade. Like the women demanding justice in Ciudad Juarez, the protestors in Honduras were poor, uneducated, and were considered dispensable. Still, under Ms. Oliva's leadership, the protests went on. Then in 1993, they won their first battle. A democratically elected government eager to break the military's hold on power issued a report about the atrocities of Battalion 316. That report was based largely on the testimonies of the relatives of the disappeared. In the report, the government acknowledged its responsibility for kidnapping and torturing at least 183 people who were missing and presumed dead.

That's when I first met Ms. Oliva. I was the Mexico City correspondent for The Baltimore Sun when my editor sent me to Tegucigalpa to report on what role the United States had played in these atrocities. I must admit I too, had a Jennifer Lopez moment. "Who cares about the Cold War anymore," I asked? Fortunately, my editors did. After 14 months of work in Honduras and Washington, I co-wrote a series of stories for the Sun detailing the United States' role in the atrocities based on the trove of documents that the Clinton Administration declassified at the Sun's request.

One of the people leading the United States cover-up of Battalion 316's crimes was the then ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte, who today, as Deputy Secretary of State, continues as a leading architect of America's troubled foreign policy. After the series was of published, Ms. Oliva presented charges against several former high-ranking Honduran military officers at the Inter-American Court for Human Rights. She provided expert testimony in support of the civil cases against alleged Honduran war criminals in exile in the United States. And in March of last year, the relatives won one of the largest judgments ever by victims against a high-ranking government official charged with crimes against humanity. A federal judge in Miami ordered retired Colonel Juan Lopez Grijalba to pay $47 million to six former victims, including survivors of Battalion 316's secret jails and relatives of others presumed dead.

Perhaps these are not the stories you expected to hear from someone like me who has had the opportunity to rub shoulders with Latin America's most powerful people. But in preparing to speak to you all, I tried to take a step away from my own work and think about what lessons I would pass on to young people if I were in your shoes. Yes, I have stood in awe of leaders like Nelson Mandela, who, despite all he personally suffered at the hands of South Africa's apartheid government, kept the country's black majority from seeking vengeance after he rose to power.

I will never forget the night Mexico broke free of more than seven decades of authoritarian rule by peacefully ousting the Institutional Revolutionary Party and electing a strapping Coca-Cola salesman named Vicente Fox.

And whether or not I agree with the politics of Hugo Chavez, the 24 hours that he fell and rose back to power in 2003 is one of the most impressive political feats I have covered.

Still, I'm just as moved by the extraordinary feats of ordinary people. I see leadership in the slums in Haiti where mothers who live in shacks on less than a dollar a day find ways to make sure their children attend school in perfectly pressed uniforms. I see it in the mountains of Guatemala, where Indian women and men organize crews that work 24 hours a day to dig out relatives crushed by mudslides because their government had given up searching.

I see it in Mexican reporters who tell the story of that country's violent drug trade at great risk to their own lives, and I see it in low-wage Mexican workers in the United States who not only send money home to their families, but who put their earnings together to build schools, roads, and hospitals.

These are the kinds of people who remind me that leadership can be found in unlikely places, that there is dignity among the poor and courage among the weak. They remind me, I guess, of where I come from, of my family's rise against the odds and that one should never underestimate a prissy young woman in pumps. Thank you.

MR. LYMAN: Ms. Thompson will now entertain some questions, so if you could step up to the mike and please give us your name, your school, and your question. I'll step out of the way.

MR. GALBRAITH: We'll record your comments for the record, but we'll follow your rules on revealing any of those.

Please use the mike so we can have it recorded.

MS. HUNTER: Catherine Hunter from San Francisco Friends School. I would love it if you would comment a little bit about women in journalism and specifically tell me what you think about training people in that field starting as young as middle school.

MS. THOMPSON: Thank you. You know, whenever I speak to young journalism classes, they ask me, "What writing courses should I take?" I think that young people who are interested in writing should take the basic writing courses. But what's most important, I think, in the training of young journalists is to teach them to be critical thinkers, to teach them history, to teach them philosophy, to teach them as much as you can about law. You know, the writing will come somewhat with practice.

Newspaper writing is very different than novel writing, very different than writing essays, I'm finding out, than papers for a master's thesis. But it's much more important that they be well-rounded, you know, deep-thinking individuals who can parachute into a situation that is completely unknown to them and take a look around at the facts and make decisions about what's right and what's not right or what's true and what might not be true, what agenda certain people have when they speak to them. So it's important to have a deep understanding about history.

One of the reasons that I'm going back to school now is that often when you're in the middle of a breaking news story, you don't get to read the history, as well, of the places that you're covering. And I think that people look at newspapers like the New York Times not just to tell you what the facts are, but to tell you what the facts mean. And to do that, you need to have a little bit of an understanding of the history, the culture, the literature, the music of the places that we're writing about.

I mean, I look now at our war in Iraq and the fighting between the Sunnis and the Shi'a, and there was a great story in the Washington Post about how few of the officials who are designing our policy in Iraq knew the difference between Sunni and Shi'a. Now, I didn't understand it, either, when I was in Mexico, but I'm not making foreign policy about Iraq, and I'm not covering Iraq, and I suspect if I had been covering Iraq, that would have been one of the first things I would have done before I stepped foot in the country. And it astounds me that our public officials didn't do their homework before they went into a place like that.

So I think what I would say most about training journalists is that the writing will come if they have got the talent. Keep them writing, and that will come. But really encourage young people -- for any profession, I'm sure this is true, but especially for journalists -- that they have a well-rounded education. If they want to specialize in science, to study as if they were going to be a scientist. If they were to write about technology, then to study as if they were going to work in technology.

I think some of our most successful reporters are people who specialized, who got specialized training in the field that they write about. And in terms of women, I don't know exactly what about women. I mean, I think that there aren't enough of us. I mean, that's sort of the obvious answer, and there certainly are not enough of us in high places. I think if you look at America's major newspapers, there isn't one being led by a woman. There are women in high places. At the New York Times, one of our managing editors is a woman, but that's a very recent phenomenon. The foreign editor, the national editor, are women. And I'm very proud of that.

But you know, there aren't newspaper women in the very top jobs in places that come to my mind right away. So I don't know. If you have a more specific question about women, I'd be happy to answer it. I just don't know what to say sort of in general terms.

MS. HALPERT: I'm Evy Halpert. I used to run the Brearley School in New York, which has ancestral ties to the New York Times of many, many sorts. And I would like to say first that you have just given one of the best talks I have ever heard, and that I stand in awe both of your career and of your ability to communicate what you were working on to all of us.

I'm concerned also and would love to hear your comments on all the coverage received in the media recently about the intimidating effect on investigative reporters of the pressure from the federal government and also state governments on reporters to reveal their sources, but in general, the menacing attitude of government in this country toward the fourth estate, and I wondered if you could comment on that in general and also as a woman who has been exploring issues that revealed less than savory aspects of our foreign policy establishment and our foreign policy in Central America and elsewhere in the world. Did you ever feel pressure to lay off on any of these stories?

MS. THOMPSON: Well, thank you for your question and your comments. I have been working in Latin America for a long time, and in Latin America, getting information is a very difficult thing. The concept of public information is very new. Mexico in the last five years passed its first transparency laws, laws that we've had on the books for a little while now, but laws which in this country I think are slowly being eroded by this administration and its all-out effort to keep the truth out of the public discussion, out of your minds, and away from journalists.

And my experience here -- you know, have I had a story in which the Bush Administration has tried to sort of get me to lay off? No. But I have certainly been in that place in Latin America, in Cuba, in Mexico. My most recent experience was in Mexico. I was involved in the coverage of the presidential election, and President Fox had a horse in the race. His name is Felipe Calderon, who did go on to be elected president of Mexico.

During the election, during the campaigns, the New York Times wrote lots of stories about both candidates. Our editorial board also wrote lots of editorials about the campaign. And the editorial board chose -- and I thought very wisely -- not to choose a candidate. The paper for the first time did not endorse a presidential candidate in Mexico, and wrote editorials that basically said whether the right-wing candidate or the left-wing candidate wins, it's not going to be harmful for Mexico.

Well, the candidates of the right, Vicente Fox's candidate -- their entire campaign was a fear campaign to sort of scare Mexicans into believing that the left-wing candidate was a Hugo Chavez, and he was going to turn Mexico either into Venezuela or into Cuba, and that they needed to be worried about him, and the United States needed to be particularly worried about him. The Mexican government understands that a paper like mine is read by people in power in Washington, and it was angry that our newspaper wasn't sounding the alarm about this leftist on the rise in Mexico.

And I got lots of phone calls about, you know, how wrong I had had the story from Vicente Fox's office. I was often shut out of interviews and press conferences with the right-wing candidate, Felipe Calderon. One morning I woke up and in the most widely distributed newspaper in Mexico there was a column written by the former foreign minister. His name is Jorge Castaneda, Vicente Fox's first foreign minister. The column was titled, "The New York Times and AMLO." A-M-L-O were the initials of the left-wing candidate, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.

The entire column was about me. It was about how I had been completely fooled by this very dangerous left-wing candidate, and that because of me -- I wish I had this kind of power -- I had gotten the entire New York Times into bed with AMLO. This column appeared about two months before the election, and it was a clear attempt by the government and by the political accomplishment of Mexico to put a chill on my coverage of the campaign.

I had lots of serious talks with my bosses about what was happening. You know, at the time that I'm being sort of creamed in the Mexican political circles for our coverage of the election there, the New York Times was in the middle of its own problems with the Bush Administration, and having to sort of fight about wiretapping stories and stories like that. So it was a very difficult time, and I think what the paper decided to do with me, because of what was happening with wiretapping is to say, "We're not going to back down."

It's very intimidating when you have an entire government, you have people who are in very important places who make lots of decisions, who can affect &endash; the New York Times plays with a lot of important people. I felt very intimidated. I felt very unsure of myself for a second, you know. Am I getting the story wrong? Am I being unfair? I mean, the New York Times, I believe, takes these questions very seriously, and I didn't just read that column and say, "Oh, they don't know what they're talking about," and go on. I stopped and I thought about it and I said, "What is happening here?" And you look back at your coverage.

So I guess what I'm saying is that there are efforts that are sinister going on against the press. I do think there is reason now, however, for the press to make sure, as well -- the responsibility is enormous now. The country is at war. The power of a newspaper story is quite strong, and so I think that while, on one hand, we need to worry very seriously about standing up and defending our rights for information, our rights to publish, our rights to keep our sources secret, we also need to be very careful and we need to do more to sort of re-energize our own efforts to make sure that we are getting it right, that we're being fair, that we are presenting both sides and not taking one side in a matter.

This is a very polarizing time in America, and it's very easy for the press to get caught up with one side or the other, and what I know that I tried to do in that situation was not sort of dismiss the criticism as completely unfair, but to try to take a look at it and make sure, you know -- redouble my own efforts to make sure that we are presenting the full side of the story.

So it's a difficult time for the press. We are being called, I think now more than ever, to seek out and report truth, and truth is a very difficult thing. It's not easy. And so, you know, we're right to have people criticize and demand a lot from us. I think what is worrisome is sort of this effort by some in the government to hide things, and that's okay. That's what we're here for. We're here to sort of look and keep looking, and dig and keep digging.

I don't know if I answered your question. I'm sure I rambled.

MR. CREEDEN: Bill Creeden, headmaster, St. Gregory's, Tucson. Good morning. Having lived in Texas, Florida, and now here in Tucson, I appreciated your comments this morning. So thank you for advising all of us about some of the issues that exist south of the border here.

My question is: There are leadership moments for all of us, and you have maybe highlighted one or two that you have had as a professional in the field. On more maybe the lighter side, could you comment on an embarrassing moment that we all have from time to time?

MS. THOMPSON: An embarrassing moment. I have gotten it wrong, you know. There are times that I have gotten it wrong.

I was one of the reporters on the series that the Times wrote and published in 2000 called "How Race is Lived in America." It was a series of stories that attempted to take a person of color and a white person and explain their relationship. It tried to zero in. Instead of looking the statistics, instead of looking at the national context, it tried to take different situations where race plays out in the lives of normal people.

So there was a story about a newsroom and a black reporter and a white reporter. There was a story about business people in Atlanta. There was a church story out of Atlanta. I wrote a story about slavery, and the history of slavery, and who gets to tell the slavery story. I wrote the story from the point of view of a white woman in Natchitoches, Louisiana, who still lived on her family's plantation and whose plantation still had its old slave quarters. They were still standing, which is rare in America, to have the slave quarters intact. And the other character in my story was an African-American historian from the National Park Service who had come to Natchitoches, Louisiana, because the white plantation owner was giving her plantation to the National Park Service for the establishment of a museum.

The Magnolia Plantation owner believed that her museum was going to tell the story of the production of cotton. Well, when the black National Park Service historian arrived and saw these slave cabins, she thought, "There's a better museum to be opened here". And so there was this whole negotiation between these two women about the development of this museum. And it was fascinating.

But at the end of that story, I had gotten facts wrong. It was published in the newspaper, and facts like where Carla, the African-American, went to school -- it was mostly the African-American figure, and I got facts about her life wrong. You know, where she went to school and where her mother had grown up, that seem small, but they're not when a person is featured at such length in the New York Times about such a sensitive topic.

And what she was most angry about I think was that in the end of this story, there is a scene in which I describe the first time that this museum group puts on a show of slavery in the slave quarters, and in this portrayal of slavery, they sort of soften the story of slavery, they soften the abuse that happened to blacks on that plantation, in an effort to appease the white slave owner. And I described that. And it very much upset the black historian in my story who felt that this isn't something that can happen overnight. These conversations cannot happen overnight, and starting with even a mild version of the slave story is better than having no story at all, and if you take one step tomorrow you can take another step and another step, and pretty soon we're at sort of the whole ugly truth of it. I think she felt that there was a judgment made in my story and that that judgment about her and her work was unfair.

So you know, I felt bad about that. I don't know if I was embarrassed, but I felt bad that I had spent a year speaking to this woman, and even at the end, you're never going to make everyone happy with your work, but that was a time and it was a story that was very important to me, again, as an African-American woman, to get right. So I will always feel a little bad about how things ended with Carla.

MR. HADLEY: Good morning. My name is Phil Hadley, from Virginia Episcopal School. Far from Virginia, I spent many years living in Guanajuato, Mexico and along the border and had the privilege now to work along the border.

MS. THOMPSON: Were you in San Miguel?

MR. HADLEY: In Guanajuato. But my question is about NGOs, your take on NGOs, and appropriateness of our students particularly being involved. Is this just a case of rich American kids intervening briefly along the border, or are there some opportunities here that might make a difference?

MS. THOMPSON: I think it's okay for rich kids to go down and feel like they're doing something to help. I don't have anything against that. I think that rich kids in particular should be involved. It's important for any student, I think, to go live somewhere else and to see another reality, and if they can go see a reality that is strikingly different than theirs, if they can see what poverty looks like close up, I think that you have an appreciation for your own country and you learn that there are struggles out there that are important, that may be far away, that may be distant, but that need the help of all of us. So I can't say that there's bad work or that it's unproductive for these young people to go.

Are there some NGOs that are better than others? Sure. But you all know probably better than I how to tell which ones are doing that. There are groups that are building houses, there are groups that are teaching in schools, there are groups that are cleaning streets. There are groups that are doing things that these governments can't do for their own societies, and so giving a child, nudging a child, into an experience like that I think changes them in such good ways, generally, that I completely push for that.

I do try not to let them get involved in NGOs that -I would encourage them not to get involved with ones that are sort of taking them for granted, and I wouldn't even want to say which ones I think those are at this microphone, which might be recording me, but I'd be happy to talk to you about programs in Mexico that I think are particularly good.

MS. GEIGER: I'm Jayne Geiger, and I head an elementary school. You know what? You have demonstrated beautifully, in just a short 40 minutes this morning, your personal commitment and how your training has also led you to seek both sides of the story or three sides of the story and to research facts, and even then you might not wind up with something completely right, and that's the credibility we put in something like the New York Times or the Baltimore Sun.

I'm concerned with what I personally feel is a big gap between where I go to seek news and where some of the younger generation goes, and that's to the blog and to the YouTubes, where it's being reported in very one-sided, very narrow -- it might not be untrue, but it's not complete, and yet, a whole generation can be forming opinions on that, and it's so much more accessible and easy for them to do it. Can you comment on that, and give us some advice?

MS. THOMPSON: I appreciate the question, because that is the sort of place where the future of newspapers is going to live or die, I think. I mean, the web is changing my business in ways that haven't happened since the printing press was invented, and that is because there are so many sources of information. What I do hope is that after all of the recent scandals at the New York Times that we haven't lost so much of our credibility that people won't turn to its name first for information. The New York Times is working very aggressively to expand its presence on the Internet. We've got, you know, film crews now who put up mini documentaries on the web. We've got reporters now who have to carry with them a camera, a small film camera. We have to file constantly to the Internet. It used to be very different, where we come home from an event, we file that night, and it would be in the paper the next morning. Now, 30 minutes after Vicente Fox speaks, you can see what it says on the New York Times web site, and it's not the AP that's always reporting, the Associated Press. It is your New York Times correspondent in Mexico City. And so it is transforming the business.

The blogs are worrisome because they're often people who aren't held to the same standards. There's not a lot of accountability for their reporting, and so it is worrisome. The Times, on the other hand, has tried to sort of compete in that field by coming up with some bloggers of its own and again, it's a blogger, but it comes with the New York Times name, which we're hoping people will see and feel confident about.

It's very hard for me to even advocate that certain people not be allowed on the web, because I believe very much in freedom of information and freedom of speech, and everybody has a right to say what they want, and now if they can say it on the Internet, whether or not I like what they have to say, I defend their right to say it. But I do think what that requires of the audience is for everyone to be a little bit more careful about who you believe, you know, and where you turn for your information.

Again, the future of the New York Times will depend on the fact that people do believe this is a place where they will come away with honest, credible, accurate reporting, balanced reporting, and not propaganda. So if newspapers are going to survive -- and I'm not sure the actual newspaper is going to survive. I don't know about you, but my nephews don't read the newspaper. They read everything on the Internet. I still need to read the newspaper. I'm of that generation where I like to hold it in my hand and I feel like I have a relationship with the paper that I wouldn't have if I had it on the web.

But people like the generation that follows us are very much into getting their information in different places, and it's up to people like you all to sort of make sure that young people understand the difference, what a blog is, what a newspaper is, what standards newspapers are held to for reporting information and what standards blogs have. But it really puts more of an onus on the audience as much as it does on the newspapers.

MR. WEIGEL: Russ Weigel, from Loomis Chafee. You mentioned in your talk that you weren't in charge of foreign policy and setting policy, and probably convinced a few of us in here that we wish you were. But just for fun, let's just imagine that you are. And if you could just return a little bit and say a very few words about what you think the priorities would be that the United States should pursue both in terms of immigration policy with Mexico and more generally with initiatives that we could take to improve the situation.

MS. THOMPSON: Sure. Well, I listened to Governor Napolitano, who's in Washington, yesterday on NPR. She's in Washington for this Winter Governors' Conference. She's the governor of Arizona. She was asked that question about immigration and what needs to be done. Most of our public officials talk a lot about two things: Clamping down on the border, putting more police on the border to stop people from coming across, and then making it hard for the immigrants to stay here by requiring them to pay taxes, registering, making it difficult for them to register their children in school if they're illegal, making it difficult for them to get driver's licenses if they're illegal, making it difficult for them to get hospital care if they are illegal.

And the one thing I always wonder in these conversations is why no one talks about getting a little tougher on the people who employ undocumented immigrants. There are anecdotal examples. The Swift meat packing plant raids. There was a raid recently on a janitorial service.

But if you check, there's not a systematic enforcement of our laws against employers, and what brings undocumented immigrants to the United States is jobs. They're not going to stop coming as long as they get jobs. It may be difficult for them to get here, and 441 of them died in the crossing last year. But that doesn't stop people from coming. They just move to new places. The enforcement will get tough here in Arizona, and they'll move back to east Texas, and things like that. So what happens is, the flow shifts, but the flow doesn't stop.

I think what happens is that there's a very powerful lobby that manages the construction in this country. In construction there were 300,000 new Hispanic workers hired in the construction industry last year alone. The construction industry depends heavily on immigrant labor.

I don't need to tell you about agriculture and all kinds of other low-skill industrial jobs. If America was serious about stopping migration, I think it might crack down harder there. That said, I think that there's another myth, and that is that Latinos are taking jobs that nobody wants. And I think that we ought to really debunk that myth, because I think that they're taking jobs that other workers, American workers, can't take because they won't pay them enough to live here. And if these jobs paid a little bit more, I do believe that Americans, low-wage, low-skill Americans would be eager to take these jobs.

I have sat in Vidalia onion fields in Georgia where the workers being hired were all Latino and there was a camp of African-American workers not far from the fields where I saw these Mexicans being hired for their jobs, and it was that the African-American workers need a certain salary, they need health benefits to compete or to live in these jobs. And so the idea that Mexicans are taking jobs no one else wants -- I don't quite believe that.

And so I think that there is a place for these workers. America's demand for workers is growing and there ought to be a guest worker program that allows for that.

I also think American industry needs to think about fairer wages for low-skill American workers, and I think the tensions that you're seeing between African-Americans and Mexicans is largely a result of that sort of myth that I think corporate America is perpetuating so that it can continue to exploit undocumented immigrant labor.

MR. GALBRAITH: We have time for two more quick questions, please.

MR. WATSON: Andy Watson, Albuquerque Academy. I had the pleasure of heading a school evaluation in Mexico City, and I noticed amid the security and the interesting events down there that whereas in my previous school, in Washington, D.C., the political enemies would get along very well taking care of their children as volunteers at the schools, in the Mexico City schools you have the criminals' children and the government officials' children all going to the same schools because they share that common desire to have their children well-educated. So that's an interesting dynamic. Has reporting taken you into the independent schools in Mexico City, and have you noticed that phenomenon also?

MS. THOMPSON: What I notice in Mexico is there's sort of an uncomfortable coexistence of the law-abiding and criminal elements. The fight against drug trafficking in Mexico is so difficult that for most of the recent history of the country, what you have found is the government reaching sort of silent accommodations with organized crime. And I saw this a lot on the border. I went to the town of Reinosa Tamaulipas, where I spoke to the mayor of the town about the fight against drug trafficking. Basically the idea there is: We don't fight it. We don't fight it. One, they get off the hook because it's a federal crime, and so local officials aren't required to fight drug trafficking.

What this mayor sort of does, not overtly, but there's this unstated agreement that "You stay out of our way, we'll stay out of your way." One day he told me he got a call on his cell phone that said, "Ociel is coming through." Ociel Cardenas was one of biggest drug traffickers in Mexico. He's now in jail. In fact, I think he was recently indicted to the United States. And while he was in jail in Mexico City, he still ran all of his operations on the border. He had a cell phone, he had 15 lawyers coming in a day, handing out messages, "You do this and you do that," so he managed his business just fine from Mexico City. What's going to begin really, I think, hurting the industry there is that it seems Mexico's begun to extradite some of these guys.

Anyway, this mayor gets this call saying, "Ociel is coming through," and he ordered his police off the street. He just ordered them off the street. And he can do that. They are not obligated by law to fight drug trafficking. And so the mayor explains to me, you know, a caravan of these black SUVs rolls through town, rolls out of town. He attends the wedding of his daughter, and then he leaves. So that happens.

I don't know if you have heard about the violence that's ravaging Laredo and Nuevo Laredo, but particularly in Nuevo Laredo there has been a real spike in kidnappings and killings, and it's mostly because there's an all-out war going on there for control of the shipment route through Nuevo Laredo, which is the biggest border crossing on the US-Mexico border.

They named a new police chief there a year and a half ago to try to stop this crime. Six hours later he was shot dead in his driveway. The next day they name a new guy, whom I go and interview. Basically this man tells me he was there, he had no police experience, he had been the treasurer of the mayor's campaign, and he was put there to sort of send the message that we're not fighting anymore. Basically I wrote this story that explained that he was taking his police out of the drug fight. They don't have to do this. It's a federal crime, if the feds want to do it, send the Army, send the federal agents, but "I'm here to make sure my police officers are fine."

And he acknowledged pretty openly to me that it was that sort of agreement, that we have to live and let live, because it's too big. It's too big. Most cops, the cops I have written about on the border, come into the US to buy bullets for their guns because they don't get enough bullets in Mexico to arm themselves properly.

And so reporters are killed for their stories. It's a very serious, very frightening situation. That's why I say that until Mexico can build a real police force and pay its people and give them guns with bullets, how do you fight this? And do we have a responsibility to help? I think absolutely. The drugs are coming here, a lot of them. So we are a partner and should be a partner for them.

MR. SMITH: I'm Neale Smith, from Roland Park Country School in Baltimore, Maryland.

MS. THOMPSON: I know that school.

MR. SMITH: I'd like to talk, if I may, just very briefly. My daughter is a reporter for Bloomberg News, and I'd like to just very quickly share with you from the standpoint of the father of a daughter.

My daughter went to a single-sex school. I feel that that was really instrumental in her development. She's now 33 years old, that being her case, single-sex school, instrumental with it. She went on, went on to Georgetown School of Foreign Service, developed independent thinking at Walden Park, a single-sex school. She went, I might add, to Garrison Forest School, but then going on to Georgetown School of Foreign Service, she was allowed to really develop her own mind, her own expression. That was very important.

She went on to work for a newspaper in Tokyo. She was in the Washington office of Asahi Shimbun. That's where she got her first experience with the news media, per se. She did that for three years. Then she went and chose to pay on her own to go to Columbia, to the Pulitzer School of Journalism. That was very instrumental. She had the experience of being there at 9/11, and that experience in reporting was also instrumental in her development.

She went then to work for a magazine in New York, The American Lawyer, for four years, and that was very much in her development.

And then she moved to Paris and is now with Bloomberg News, covering the legal side of France, which is and will be quite interesting for her.

The thing that I want to make mention was, she always has had -- and we have encouraged it -- an inquisitive mind and being in a single-sex school enabled her to express her thoughts openly and not in a male/female competitive scene. That was very, very helpful for her.

One of the things I just made mention of, I remember back in 2000 she and I were there one morning at the breakfast table at home. She was asking me one question after another. It had to do with politics. And you know, I answered the questions, and she then says to me, "Dad, I don't agree with one thing you said."

Well, as far as I was concerned, while I didn't -- you know, I didn't say, "Gee, that's absolutely fantastic," it was very good that she felt comfortable in disagreeing, and that in the world of journalism, the ability to stand up and to disagree is very important. You know, you're getting paid --

MS. THOMPSON: Well, if I could disagree just a little bit with you, I know you all know this debate much better than I do, the all-girls' school versus the co-ed school, and I have talked about it a lot with friends, as I got ready to come here and meet with you. And I keep coming down to this: You know, it implies saying that girls can only thrive in an all-girls' school, or that they thrive better implies that somehow we can't compete.

I think that young women are going to live in co-ed society, and I think it's commendable what your child has done. She sounds phenomenal, and I think an all-girls' education can certainly produce that. I don't think, though, that only an all-girls' education can produce that. I think that girls can thrive and they can hold their own really well and tell a guy to his face, you know, "That's just not right," and they can do that.

So I think that it probably depends on the girl. It probably depends on her home life. There are all kinds of factors. But I don't know if one is better than the other. And my feeling is, if I had a daughter -- and I don't -- I would hope she would want to go to a co-ed school, I think, if I can just throw that out.

MR. LYMAN: Ginger, thank you so much. Those were wonderful words, insightful questions and answers. What a stimulating talk. I wish we had some more time to continue. I do apologize for my wacky sense of humor when I called you in the middle of your speech. I hope you have safe travels, heading back home, back to study, back to get some homework done.

I'm going to turn it over to Bruce.

MR. GALBRAITH: Brad, thank you for working through your brother at the Times and making that contact. It's been, as we all know, a great morning. A great, great start.

A few things that will help you enjoy the rest of the day. I'd like to thank Burch for working on the weather, congratulations. The refreshments will be outside, except for the sweet rolls, which the bees were bothering. They're right next door, if you missed breakfast. They have brought those back inside.

The Jeep tour is at 1:00, and it goes from the foyer of the ballroom, which is down the hallway away from the desk past the shops, at 1:00. And the second tour on the tram and to De Grazia Gallery goes at 1:30 from the lobby near the desk.

Plan ahead about food. Vista Barista has food. If you went out now and called, you can have a box lunch prepared and ready waiting for you at Vista Barista. They do have some sandwiches and things to go, because for the 1:00 folks, the time maybe a little short between the end of the second session and when you go. Vista Barista is a little food area next to the first floor restaurant. There's a smaller place on the first floor, right next door.

SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Behind the bar.

MR. GALBRAITH: There you go. There's a definitive direction. And if you don't know where the bar is, ask somebody.

Some of Stephen Davenport's books are available, $15, cash or check.

Dinner tonight is here. There's a NAPSG hosted bar from 6:30 to 7:15. Following that, if you want to buy bottles of wine for the table, you can do that through your table server. And beer and wine. And at 12:00 Ham Clark or David Harman will be at the back of the room to tell you what they have learned about tennis, and Brad Lyman will be at the back of the room to tell you what we have learned about golf, in case you want to try to get involved in some of those activities.

I believe that's it. If you have questions, come and see me. I have the trip list, if you want to adjust them. There still are three spaces today for Sabino Canyon. The Jeeps are full. Other trips, there are flexible things, if you want to. If there are questions that come up, we'll clear those up at the beginning of the next session. Enjoy your break, and thank you.