Reuters has hired Alexander Villegas to be a senior correspondent in Chile.
He has been a freelance multimedia journalist based in Costa Rica. His work has been published in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, BBC, The Miami Herald, Hakai Magazine and The Smithsonian Magazine.
He has reported on indigenous land conflicts in Central America, unrest in Nicaragua, debt crises in Latin America, drug trafficking in Costa Rican fishing communities, climate change and Amazon’s labor practices.
From 2018 to 2019, he was the assistant managing editor of The Tico Times, Costa Rica’s oldest English-language publication. he managed a small newsroom filled with talented reporters and guided the newspaper through the 2018 Nicaraguan crisis and the sexual assault allegations against former president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oscar Arias.
Villegas up in Costa Rica and then got my BA in journalism from the University of Connecticut where he won a 2010 Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Connecticut Journalism Contest. In 2017, he graduated with a Masters in international reporting from the University of British Columbia.
