A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

If some journalists are born with printer's ink in their blood, as the old expression has it, then TIME correspondents have veins filled with airplane fuel. Chasing the news, they can log more miles in a month than most mortals do in a lifetime. Few correspondents are more thoroughly traveled than Mexico City Bureau Chief John Borrell, who directs TIME's coverage of Central America, including this week's six-page report on the region's uncertain advance toward peace.

Born in England and reared in New Zealand, Borrell began his journalism career "drawing weather maps and covering flower shows" for a provincial newspaper. An itch to see the world soon sent him off to Africa, where he spent eleven years winging around that vast continent, covering wars and revolutions. In 1982 he joined TIME as Nairobi bureau chief. He was later based in Beirut and Cairo, using a score of airlines in a dozen countries during nearly three years of reporting on the Middle East.

Borrell's travel habits changed somewhat when he arrived in Mexico City a year ago. "There aren't the enormous distances and other logistical problems that made covering Africa and the Middle East so tiring," he said. "In Africa the quickest way of getting from one country to another often involved changing planes in Europe." In Central America, by contrast, "you can sometimes leave a government garrison and drive only a few miles down the road to make contact with the guerrillas."

Correspondent John Moody, who has spent his reportorial career catching flights from bureaus in New York, Moscow and Paris for United Press International and from Bonn and Vienna for TIME, touched down in Mexico City a year ago. Since then he has spent most of his time shuttling around Central America's capitals. Moody reported much of this week's main story, wrote the one-page description of life in war-weary El Salvador and conducted interviews with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias Sanchez, author of the peace plan and winner last month of the Nobel Peace Prize, and with Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega Saavedra. Said Moody: "Getting in to see the top people makes a major difference in a reporter's ability to understand a complicated story and to convey that understanding to readers."