Roberto Lovato is a New York-based writer with New America Media and a frequent contributor to The Nation Magazine. He's also written for the Los Angeles Times, Salon, Der Spiegel, Utne Magazine, La Opinion, and other national and international media outlets. He has also appeared as a source and commentator on English and Spanish language network news shows on Univision, CNN, PBS and other programs and made a recent appearance on Bill Moyers Journal. On the creative electronic front, Roberto has produced programming for NPR, Pacifica and the Univision Television Network, where he helped develop and produce Hora Cero, one of that networks first documentary series about immigration in the United States. Prior to becoming a writer, Lovato was the former Executive Director of CARECEN, which was the largest immigrant rights organization in the country. You can find him posting regularly on media, migration, politics and other issues at his blog, www.ofamerica.wordpress.com.

Blog Entries by Roberto Lovato

Justicia Poetica: Dobbs Rises and Then Falls Thanks to Immigrants

2 Comments | Posted November 12, 2009 | 12:03 PM (EST)


As I watched the sad eyes of Lou Dobbs last night while he bade an abrupt farewell to his long career at CNN, I shed the tears that he apparently couldn't. I cried in part because, regardless of the Basta Dobbs campaign's -- and my own -- constitutional differences...

Read Post

Questions Surrounding Dobbs' Gunfire Incident Cast Doubt on CNN's Credibility

91 Comments | Posted October 30, 2009 | 12:52 PM (EST)


Conflicting reports about a bullet that hit the top of Lou Dobbs' house in Sussex, New Jersey, are raising new and serious questions about the credibility of Lou Dobbs, CNN and its President, Jon Klein. Reports in the New York Post and here on the Huffington Post...

Read Post

BastaDobbs Responds to Invite from Lou

80 Comments | Posted October 21, 2009 | 05:10 PM (EST)


Today, in 18 cities across the country, participants in the BastaDobbs.com campaign held public events calling on CNN to fire Lou Dobbs, including the one I led in New York City outside of CNN's headquarters. As we made our case on the street below, the producers of Lou Dobbs'...

Read Post

CNN, You Can't Have It Both Ways: It's Either Dobbs or Your Latino Future

51 Comments | Posted October 13, 2009 | 10:10 AM (EST)


On the eve of CNN's Latino in America series (LIA) -- its most important and expensive attempt to capture Latino audiences -- Latinos are of one mind about the two faces of CNN. I know this because I just spent the last two weeks traveling the country talking to Latino...

Read Post

This is About CNN: Anti-Dobbs Movement Not Just Targeting Dobbs

113 Comments | Posted September 28, 2009 | 06:08 AM (EST)


As the movement calling for his ouster from CNN continues to surge, Lou Dobbs is fighting back -- and fumbling. Instead of responding to legitimate concerns about his anti-Latino fear-mongering, Dobbs expressed himself in a manner resembling that of the extremists he promotes on his show: with lies, angry outbursts...

Read Post

As Movement Demanding CNN Dump Him Grows, Dobbs Plays Victim

530 Comments | Posted September 21, 2009 | 01:17 PM (EST)


Faced with a growing movement of communities demanding that CNN drop his program, Lou Dobbs responded Friday with one of his favorite postures: the victimized defender of American virtue. "They ask CNN to fire me because I oppose illegal immigration" said Dobbs, who added, ""The last thing they want...

Read Post

Latinos to CNN: Dump Dobbs Now

464 Comments | Posted September 16, 2009 | 10:47 AM (EST)


This week, Lou Dobbs is broadcasting his radio show from a national lobbying conference sponsored by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an organization founded by a white nationalist and designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. At a time when studies document the growing link...

Read Post

Obama's Vision of "Truly Civil" Immigrant Prison Reform: More Prisoners, More Prisons

6 Comments | Posted August 6, 2009 | 01:12 PM (EST)


An article in today's New York Times provides an outline of the Obama administration's vision of immigrant detention reform: more prisoners, more prisons -- but a "truly civil system." That there will be no fundamental changes to the massively corrupt and widely criticized detention system can be seen in...

Read Post

Honduran Human Rights Leader: Clinton "Reckless," U.S. Silent About "Terrorismo"

18 Comments | Posted July 29, 2009 | 08:55 AM (EST)


When finally reached by telephone, the very hard-to-reach Bertha Oliva was in the middle of a typically tragic day in post-coup Honduras. " [The military and paramilitary operatives] just bombed a nearby labor union," she said. Oliva leads the Tegucigalpa-based Committee for the Detained and Disappeared of Honduras (COFADEH), which...

Read Post

Our Man in Honduras

93 Comments | Posted July 22, 2009 | 10:11 AM (EST)


"If you want to understand who the real power behind the [Honduran] coup is" says Robert White, president of the Washington-based Center for International Policy, during a recent interview, "you need to find out who's paying Lanny Davis."

Davis, an ally of the Clinton family who is best...

Read Post

What Kind of "Hope" Is Obama Offering Honduras and Latin America?

111 Comments | Posted July 10, 2009 | 09:48 AM (EST)


For a U.S. audience, to watch as the wet, pinkish-red jelly -- the brains of Isis Odem Murillo, the young man killed last Sunday by the U.S.-trained Honduran military -- spill onto those who carried the Christ-like victim was to watch another tragedy unfold in a far off land.

...
Read Post

Honduran Violence, U.S. Aid Test Obama's Global Image

150 Comments | Posted July 6, 2009 | 09:31 AM (EST)


While English language television in the United States mined the minutiae of Michael Jackson's upcoming funeral, millions watching Spanish, Portuguese and French language media in the rest of the Americas were transfixed by live broadcasts of the Honduran military shooting and killing a 10-year-old boy and other protesters.

From the...

Read Post

Obama Has the Power and Responsibility to Help Restore Democracy in Honduras

83 Comments | Posted June 29, 2009 | 09:10 AM (EST)


Viewed from a distance, the streets of Honduras look, smell and sound like those of Iran: expressions of popular anger - burning vehicles, large marches and calls for justice in a non-English language - aimed at a constitutional violation of the people's will (the coup took place on the eve...

Read Post

Justicia!: Sotomayor and the Long March of Puerto Rican History

Posted June 18, 2009 | 10:44 AM (EST)


NEW YORK -- Inside the red brick walls of the Bronxdale housing projects, 24-year-old mother of two Geisha Sas says she still hears echoes of music from the 1950s, when her building's most famous former resident, Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, lived there. "Older people still listen to Tito Puente...

Read Post

Sotomayor's Confirmation Hearings Will Be a Trial of the GOP

365 Comments | Posted May 27, 2009 | 10:00 AM (EST)


As she faces what is already expected to be a host of hostile questions from the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee in her confirmation hearings, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama's first nominee to the Supreme Court, should remember one thing: that it is not she who will be...

Read Post

Silencing the Breakers of Silence: UN Durban II Conference Threatened by Conflicts

Posted April 21, 2009 | 04:05 AM (EST)


GENEVA, SWITZERLAND Before asking him about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial speech here at the followup to the U.N.-sponsored World Conference Against Racism (Durban II), I first gave Nobel prize-winner, Elie Wiesel, my thanks. I thanked him not because of his condemnation of an opening speech in which the Iranian president called...

Read Post

U.S. Immigration Policies Bring Global Shame on Us

Posted February 26, 2009 | 03:14 PM (EST)


As one of the five full-time media relations specialists working for Maricopa County Sheriff and reality TV star Joe Arpaio -- "America's Toughest Sheriff" -- Detective Aaron Douglas deals with the world's media more than most. Though he is a local official, his is often the first voice heard by...

Read Post

Immigration Detention Reform Moves to Front Burner

Posted February 2, 2009 | 01:21 PM (EST)


Guantanamo Bay isn't the only prison crisis that President Barack Obama will have to deal with. There's another crisis growing - in the many immigration detention centers carpeting the interior of the country. Long ignored by policymakers because they make up the politically lethal combination of immigration and prison reform,...

Read Post

Obama Considering Appointment of Centrist Dem & Alberto Gonzalez Supporter as Interior Secretary

Posted December 15, 2008 | 01:18 PM (EST)


This article in the Denver Post (DP) indicates that President-elect Obama may be preparing to announce the appointment of Colorado Senator Ken Salazar as Secretary of the Interior. According to the DP piece,


"U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar is a leading contender to become President-elect Barack Obama's...

Read Post

Grijalva Appointment to Interior Department Would Bring Ecological-and Political- Balance to Obama Cabinet

Posted December 6, 2008 | 11:28 AM (EST)


Anyone who has visited a national park or traversed the country's diverse wilderness comes home with gorgeous, yet distressing images of it; those returning from a visit to one of the more than 562 tribes the federal government recognizes and is supposed to assist also bring back sad stories about...

Read Post