My year at The Tico Times, 1992-1993, coincided with a complete life transition from punk to salsera, from music critic to journalist, and rockily out of singlehood. And boy did I learn a lot.
The Tico Times set the standard for me for ethics and for careful, aggressive reporting. While I was there, Peter Brennan produced the fantastic series on teak investment scams in Costa Rica, which was a brave and fascinating piece. The Tico Times was never scared to take on the big guys.
I try to model my own news-planning meetings with my staff I m now senior correspondent for Reuters in Chile on the great weekly planning meetings run by Dery. What a wealth of ideas and projects would come out of the reporters.
Kurt Aguilar and Cathryn Domrose, Catalina Calderón, John McPhaul, Brian Harris, Maria Sacchetti, Peter Brennan and others I worked with at The Tico Times or met during my time there, have become life-long friends.
A few years ago some of us had a wonderful reunion at the Aguilar-Domrose home in San Francisco, and there was a belly laugh a minute as we reminisced.
My favorite reporting memory is an interview with then Minister of Natural Resources Hernán Bravo. The government had denied reports and complaints that a tourism project on the Caribbean coast was violating environmental laws. I hiked up the hill from the Tico to his office, and showed him maps that proved the hotel being built was partly overlapping both a nature reserve AND an indigenous reserve.
His immortal answer: Mirá, que vacilón. And the great thing: we ran it as a headline. Who else but the Tico would have dared?
Fiona Martin Ortiz
