Monica Villamizar

Monica Villamizar's picture
Monica Villamizar
Correspondent | Cuba
Biography
Mónica Villamizar is an award-winning correspondent for Al Jazeera English based out of Washington, DC.

She holds a masters degree in political science from the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris. Besides her native Spanish, she speaks English, French, Italian, and Japanese. In 2006 she received a Premio Nacional de Periodismo Simón Bolívar award for best TV feature or report, for a series of reports on South Africa's peace process.

Follow Monica on Twitter: monica_vv

Latest posts by Monica Villamizar

By Monica Villamizar in Americas on September 12th, 2011

“This is the war that has marked our generation," the commander of the Guantanamo Base said as he spoke to dozens of soldiers ahead of a commemorative run to honour military members killed in the past 10 years since 9/11.

Some soldiers had pictures of the victims taped to their running shirts. The military base in Cuba, like other bases overseas, was on an increased security alert - on the second degree level.

Tags: al-Qaeda, Cuba
By Monica Villamizar in Americas on August 15th, 2011

"If you want to see the inner workings of the drug trafficking business, Honduras is the country," says Victor (not his real name). He was a major drug trafficker before he became a born-again Christian, after being shot in the skull and surviving.

Now he wants to purge all his sins, including several murders, to avoid being sent to hell in the afte life, he says. 

Victor  was in charge of overseeing cocaine shipments and "narco planes" to Honduras.

The illegal drugs from Colombia and Venezuela travel to the heart of Central America, where they are handed over to Mexican drug lords in Guatemala or Mexico.

By Monica Villamizar in Americas on July 22nd, 2011

Pictures of the latest objects seized by the police in the Mexican state of Michoacan, revealed that the mysterious 'Knights Templar" drug cartel is more bizarre than most people imagine.

There were four hooded tunics, with a red cross, a metal helmet, and a pamphlet or Templar rule book. This drug cartel claims to draw inspiration from the medieval Christian warriors who fought to protect Jerusalem and the Holy Grail.

No one knows if its founder, Servando Gomez, a school teacher, was a history entuthiast or simply read the Da Vinci Code.

The rules in the modern day 'templar bible' call for observance of 'gentleman' like behaviour and respect for women – but also state that any disclosure of knights templar activities will result in the death of the person and his whole family, and confiscation by the cartel of the snitch’s property.

By Monica Villamizar in Americas on July 6th, 2011
Photo by EPA

Hugo Chavez took off his medical leave clothes - wind breaker and sweat pants that often match Fidel Castro's - and wore the military uniform once again. Hours later he made a surprise appearance in his native Venezuela.

His health saga has had ups and downs, but especially has borne the trademark of the cold war era.

After 24 days of absence he arrived in Caracas under total secrecy. The images provided by state TV were edited (never showing him walking up or down the stairs off the plane) and disclosed at seven in the morning.

Doctors "and scientists" are reportedly checking the president and monitoring his health, he can not be in public appearances or give speeches for more than 30 minutes.

But what exactly is wrong with Chavez?

By Monica Villamizar in Middle East on May 26th, 2011
Photo by Mohamed Shawky

Political "street art" in Egypt has proven to be dangerous, only hours ago Mohammed Fahmy @ganzeer was arrested, apparently in connection with his graffiti work.

There are more and more graffiti emerging around Cairo. Many are stencil-graffiti  (done by a precut model placed against the wall and sprayed). It is fast and it minimizes the risk of being caught by authorities, in Cairo there is currently a 2am military curfew.

By Monica Villamizar in Americas on March 13th, 2011
Adrian Lamo [Al Jazeera]
By Monica Villamizar in Americas on February 24th, 2011
AbdelBaset al-Megrahi was given a hero's welcome upon his return to Libya [Reuters]

Stephanie Bernstein, a rabbi in Bethesda, Maryland, has been one of the most outspoken victims of the Lockerbie bombing.

Her husband Michael was among the 259 killed when Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over the Scottish town in 1988.

As she welcomes me into her home she talks about her 14 years of marriage to Mr Bernstein, an American attorney whose job was to find and deport Nazis who entered the US illegally after World War II.

She has followed the Libyan uprising closely. Just hours ago, the Libyan justice minister, who resigned in protest against Muammar Gaddafi's attacks on his own population, said he had proof that the Libyan leader was the one who ordered the Lockerbie attack.

She says "that is exactly what we have been saying for years. It is no surprise; Libya is a police state, nothing happens there without Gaddafi's approval."

By Monica Villamizar in Americas on November 30th, 2010
Al Jazeera photo

“It’s worse than Iraq here.” I heard this phrase repeatedly while reporting in the complexo d’alemao favela. The reason was apparent from the first moment I heard about the place. The slum in northern Rio is home to four thousand people. A year ago I was there to interview a woman who had lost her daughter in a police shootout, a stray bullet having ripped through the tin door of her rickety home and killed the child at night.

Getting to the interview location was an odyssey. Chatuba, the hillside slum where she lived, had two checkpoints; the roads were blocked by metal poles and young men in flip flops armed with assault rifles and RPGs were posted at each one.

Supplied with radios and walkie talkies, they decided who went in and who went out. I asked our community escort back then if we could film and he said, "If you take the camera out they will shoot you." We later saw nearly 50 armed drug dealers, or "traffickantes", in some sort of celebration.

By Monica Villamizar in Americas on October 19th, 2010
Photo by Reuters

Edison Pena is a keen runner and even while trapped hundreds of metres below the ground he managed to keep running. He did it for hours every day to take his mind off his situation.

Edison was described as one of the most depressed men in the Chilean mine but that's not the way he came across the first time I saw him.

Two days before the rescue operation brought the first man to the surface, I managed to make contact with the group myself. I bought a tiny video camera and recorded a message for the miners.

I introduced myself and explained that I was one of the many journalists waiting outside the mine for the men to be rescued. In my video message, I invited any of the miners to record their own thoughts.

By Monica Villamizar in Americas on October 10th, 2010
Photo by AFP

"I am going to take you down the mine so that you understand that you shouldn’t ever want to be a miner," a Chilean miner warns his six-year-old son.

Daniel Sanderson has brought young Christian to the entrance of a giant copper mine, similar to the one that's been in the headlines for the last two months, ever since a collapse trapped 33 men deep underground in the mountains of the Atacama desert.

Daniel is familiar with the San Jose mine; he was due to be working there on August 5 but at the last minute he decided to stay at home. If he'd gone to work he would have felt the huge rock fall at about 2pm that blocked the long spiral mineshaft and trapped many of Daniel's friends, and his cousin.  

Since the accident Daniel says he's felt guilty for not being with his colleagues on the day the mine collapsed. He says the mine owners have never cared much about safety and that many men "heard the mine crying a lot" in the days before the accident.

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Biography

Monica Villamizar's picture
Monica Villamizar
Correspondent
Mónica Villamizar is an award-winning correspondent based out of Washington, DC.

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