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Mike O’Connor, Advocate for Mexican Journalists, Dies at 67 | Mike O’Connor, Advocate for Mexican Journalists, Dies at 67 |
(about 13 hours later) | |
Mike O’Connor, a longtime foreign correspondent who had worked in recent years to protect journalists in Mexico, died on Sunday in Mexico City. He was 67. | Mike O’Connor, a longtime foreign correspondent who had worked in recent years to protect journalists in Mexico, died on Sunday in Mexico City. He was 67. |
His death was confirmed by the Committee to Protect Journalists, where he worked as the representative for Mexico. The Los Angeles Times reported that he died from a heart attack while sleeping in his apartment. | |
Mr. O’Connor was an outspoken advocate for journalists in Mexico, one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a reporter in the last five years. He challenged government officials to do more to protect journalists and to prosecute their deaths in a country where such crimes often go unpunished. | |
A veteran foreign reporter, he had worked in Central America, the former Yugoslavia and Israel for National Public Radio, The New York Times and other organizations. | |
His death leaves a void in the campaign for Mexican journalists’ safety, said Javier Garza Ramos, a former editor of the Mexican newspaper El Siglo de Torreón, which was attacked in 2011 when gunmen fired shots at the paper’s building and set a car on fire. | |
“Mike’s presence was essential during a crisis,” Mr. Garza Ramos said in a Committee to Protect Journalists blog post. “In the rush to take protective measures, Mike’s phone calls, several times a day, were not only a reminder that we were not alone, but a guide amid confusion.” | |
Mr. O’Connor was born in Germany on Feb. 8, 1946. His father was the director of a large refugee camp there after World War II. | |
In his 2007 memoir, “Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run,” Mr. O’Connor discussed his unusual upbringing in Texas and Mexico. His parents, he wrote, sometimes made the family flee their home on short notice without explanation. | |
Mr. O’Connor began working for CBS News in 1983, covering the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. He then covered Central America for National Public Radio and, in the late 1990s, reported from the former Yugoslavia for The New York Times. He later returned to NPR, where he reported from Israel and the Palestinian territories. | |
In 1994 he was part of a team of NPR reporters that won an Overseas Press Award for best radio spot news for a piece on Haiti. | |
The Los Angeles Times reported that Mr. O’Connor is survived by his wife, Tracy Wilkinson, that newspaper’s Mexico bureau chief, as well as two sons, two sisters, two half-brothers and two granddaughters. | |
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: | |
Correction: January 1, 2014 | |
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. O’Connor’s book “Crisis, Pursued by Disaster, Followed Closely by Catastrophe: A Memoir of Life on the Run” was published. It was 2007, not 2009. |