Lourdes Garcia-Navarro
Dario Lopez Mills/N/A

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

South America Correspondent

Lourdes Garcia-Navarro is an NPR international correspondent covering South America for NPR. She is based in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Previously, she served a NPR's correspondent based in Israel, reporting on stories happening throughout the Middle East. She was one of the first reporters to enter Libya after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising began and spent months painting a deep and vivid portrait of a country at war. Often at great personal risk, Garcia-Navarro captured history in the making with stunning insight, courage and humanity.

For her work covering the Arab Spring, Garcia-Navarro was awarded a 2011 George Foster Peabody Award, a Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, and an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Alliance for Women and the Media's Gracie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement.

Before her assignment to Jerusalem began in 2009, Garcia-Navarro served for more than a year as NPR News' Baghdad Bureau Chief and before that three years as NPR's foreign correspondent in Mexico City, reporting from that region as well as on special assignments abroad.

Garcia-Navarro got her start in journalism as a freelancer with the BBC World Service and Voice of America, reporting from Cuba, Syria, Panama and Europe. She later became a producer for Associated Press Television News before transitioning to AP Radio. While there, Garcia-Navarro covered post-Sept. 11 events in Afghanistan and developments in Jerusalem. In 2002, she began a two-year reporting stint based in Iraq.

In addition to the Murrow award, Garcia-Navarro was honored with the 2006 Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize for a two-part series "Migrants' Job Search Empties Mexican Community." She contributed to NPR News reporting on Iraq, which was recognized with a 2005 Peabody Award and a 2007 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton.

Garcia-Navarro holds a Bachelor of Science degree in International Relations from Georgetown University and an Master of Arts degree in journalism from City University in London. Lourdes is married to Times of London journalist James Hider. They have a daughter and they sometimes travel together for work and always for play.

Highlights from Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

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A couple watches fireworks exploding over Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro on Jan. 1. Some 2 million people visit the beach on New Year's Eve. Lifeguards say they usually perform more rescues than any other time of the year. Felipe Dana/AP hide caption

toggle caption Felipe Dana/AP

Maria Mercedes Vittar (from left), Paola Fiorita and Ana Zappella are all unmarried mothers in Buenos Aries who often spend time together. In Argentina and most other Latin American countries, well over half of all babies are now born to unwed mothers. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Lourdes Garcia-Navarro/NPR

Health inspectors collect samples of mosquito larvae from standing water in a garden in a middle-class neighborhood in the north of Rio de Janeiro. They are searching for places where the Aedes aegypti mosquito breeds — that's the one that carries Zika virus. Lourdes Garcia-Navarro/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Lourdes Garcia-Navarro/NPR

Francisco Carlos Fonseca is the manager of Marina Confiança, a resort located on the banks of the Cantareira reservoir system. Behind him is a boat ramp that once led to a lake that he says used to be more than 100 feet deep. Kainaz Amaria/NPR hide caption

toggle caption Kainaz Amaria/NPR

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