Alfonso Chardy, whose methodical reporting ushered The Miami Herald to a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Iran-contra scandal in 1986 and contributed to three other Pulitzers that the newspaper won, died on April 9 in a Miami hospital. He was 72.
The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Siobhan T. Morrissey.
Mr. Chardy was instrumental in uncovering a link between the illegal sale of weapons to Iran orchestrated by senior Reagan administration officials to facilitate the release of Western hostages, and the covert diversion of proceeds from that sale to support right-wing rebels in Nicaragua known as the contras.
He wrote more than half of the 10 articles that won the Pulitzer for national reporting in 1987 and revealed the role of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver L. North in what amounted to a money laundering plot by senior officials to bypass a congressional arms embargo against Iran to secure the hostages’ release. The Westerners were being held in Lebanon by the Iranian-supported militant group Hezbollah. In Nicaragua, the contras were battling the leftist Sandinista government.
(The Herald shared the national reporting prize with The New York Times, which was cited for its coverage of the Challenger space shuttle disaster.)
Mr. Chardy joined other teams of reporters at The Herald in winning Pulitzer Prizes for public service in 1993, awarded for the paper’s coverage of Hurricane Andrew; for investigative reporting in 1999, for revealing voter fraud in a mayoral election, which was subsequently overturned; and for breaking news in 2001, for articles about Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban boy who was seized in a raid by immigration agents and returned to Cuba after a court challenge to his U.S. qualifications for asylum.
Over his nearly four-decade career, Mr. Chardy covered U.S. Latin American policy in Washington; served as Middle East correspondent in Jerusalem; reported on earthquakes in Haiti and Mexico and the protests by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina against the disappearance of their children during the country’s years of dictatorship; and worked at The Herald’s Spanish-language edition, El Nuevo Herald, in 2017.
A self-taught journalist and English-speaker and a two-index finger typist (just one finger when he was exhausted), Mr. Chardy was known for being collegial, quick and for subsisting during the week primarily on a diet of popcorn.
Alfonso Nieto Chardi was born on April 14 1951, in Mexico City. His father, Alfonso Chardi Cordoba, was an accountant. His mother, Emma Nieto Miranda de Chardi, managed the household.
Alfonso learned English by listening to the radio and taking classes in the language in high school before attending a college-preparatory school. He was gravitating toward a career in engineering but was drawn to reporting in 1968 after mingling with an influx of foreign journalists who had come to cover the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City and student uprisings there.
“I was a student then, and I would approach the reporters and ask them what they did and where they were from, and I was fascinated by their tales about going to the Caribbean or around the world covering things,” Mr. Chardy recalled in “Winning Pulitzers: The Stories Behind Some of the Best News Coverage of Our Time” (1991) by Karen Rothmyer.
He explained his technique of investigative reporting this way: “First I plan my piece by figuring out what the theme is going to be. Then I go out like a vacuum cleaner and get as much information as possible about this particular issue.”
After serving in the Army, he studied for four months in the United States in 1969, including at Indiana University in Bloomington under a State Department exchange program. He was then hired as a proofreader and translator for The Mexico City News.
He joined The Associated Press in Mexico City in 1974, then worked for United Press International and as a freelance correspondent for The Miami Herald until 1980, when the newspaper hired him full-time to cover the Mariel boatlift of refugees from Cuba.
His Mexican passport provided access to Cuba and other places that were barred to U.S. journalists. He lived in Key Biscayne, Fla., with Ms. Morrissey, whom he married in 1994. She is his only immediate survivor.
Though he was born Alfonso Chardi Nieto, he became known professionally as Alfonso Chardy when his first editor at The Mexico City News misspelled his byline. In those early days, Ms. Morrissey said, Mr. Chardy lacked the confidence to correct him.
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