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Falmouth Forum Series 2004-2005

Making Democracy: What We Can Learn from Mexico
October 29, 2004 - Lillie Auditorium, 7:30 PM. Lectures are free and open to the public.

Julia Preston is a co-author, with Samuel Dillon, of OPENING MEXICO: The Making of a Democracy. She was a member of The New York Times staff that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on international affairs, for its series that profiled the corrosive effects of drug corruption in Mexico.

Preston was named Federal Courts reporter in New York City for the Times in May 2004. Before that she was the Times' deputy investigations editor from March 2003 to April 2004.  She had been United Nations Bureau Chief since October 2002, covering the Security Council deliberations on Iraq. Prior to that, she was an editor on the Foreign Desk in New York. Preston was a New York Times correspondent in Mexico from September 1995 until September 2000. 

OPENING MEXICO draws on research conducted in Mexico during 2000-2001, when she and Dillon were recipients of a MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant.

Ms. Preston came to The New York Times in July 1995 after working at the Washington Post for nine years as a foreign correspondent.  She is a 1997 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for distinguished coverage of Latin America and a 1994 winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Humanitarian Journalism.

She covered the United Nations for the Washington Post from January 1993 until May 1995, a period that included crises in Bosnia, Somalia, North Korea, Rwanda and Iraq.  She was a Washington Post Latin America correspondent based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 1990 until 1992, covering the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello.

Previously she was the Washington Post bureau chief in Miami from 1986 through 1989, covering wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala and the conflict between the United States and Panamanian general Manuel Antonio Noriega, as well as Cuba and Haiti.  Before that Ms. Preston had worked for The Boston Globe and National Public Radio.

Born in Lake Forest, Illinois on May 29, 1951, Ms. Preston received a B.A. degree in Latin American Studies from Yale University in 1976.  She speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese.  She has one daughter.


A buffet dinner precedes each lecture at 6:00 pm, in the Swope Dining Room. Tickets for the dinners must be purchased in advance. For more information, contact the MBL Communications Office at: (508) 289-7423 or