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Introduction The old roadway winds through the southern highlands of Guatemala to the Pacific coast. It was one ofthe worst Scott Norvell had ever traveled in Central America, a region he knew well enough to write about for Time as well as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Journal o/Commerce. The old road skirts the base of Aqua Volcano, south of Antigua, and leads eventually to Palin, where it will link up with newer and better highway. Often little more now than an unpaved path, this long-neglected route was broken by frequent washouts and rocks the size of footballs. It was far better suited to the horse traffic of its day, Norvell thought, than to his rented Nissan. Before long the road would become impassable because of frequent clashes between government troops and the guerrillas who maintained a stronghold in these remote, forboding hills. The threat of violence was clear and present. Armed extremist groups, procommunist and anticommunist, were poised at any time for yet another terrorist raid. In an attempt to head off more violence, the government in 1951 had taken over thousands of acres of private property, much of it belonging to the United Fruit Company, and parceled it out to landless campesinos. But no lasting peace had yet been found. The army had seized control of the government again in 1963. In 1967 three Guatemalan congressmen and three U.S. Embassy officials, including the ambassador, were assassinated. There was another presidential election in 1970, and the winner was an army colonel. Times remained tense. On that warm, muggy day in 1977, Scott Norvell was stopped four or five times by roaming patrols of seventeen-year-old soldiers who pointed expensive Galil assault rifles at him and asked lots of questions. Had he seen any guerrillas? No, he said. Nada. But during that otherwise uncomfortable journey he did run across something he found far more interesting. It was a monument beside the dusty roadway. Larger and more imposing than a highway marker, the monument must have impressed passersby in the old days when there was brisk traffic along the road. Now the shrine was chipped and eroding, its lettering badly rusted. Worse yet, it was situated directly in the path of the lush, creeping vegetation that had already engulfed huge sections of the old roadbed. The monument had been erected long ago to commemorate the belated christening 1 2 ACreed for My Profession of the highway, in honor not of a Guatemalan politician, but of a visitor from North America. Norvell recognized the name. Swiftly, he translated the rustcovered text: WALTER WILLIAMS HIGHWAY, 1925 The Government of the Republic, in tribute to the memory of the North American citizen Walter Williams, President of the University of Missouri and founder of the first school ofjournalism and the World Press Congress, who with his presence on the inauguration of this highway in 1925 cordially fostered relations between the great people of North America and our own, is disposed to designate it in his name in recognition of his merits.l Like the monument, the name and reputation of Walter Williams have been dimmed a bit by the passing years. The World Press Congress, which had met once in Guatemala, during 1925, was a utopian dream that if peoples could only communicate better then international tensions would disappear. Perhaps its only tangible legacy, for Guatemala at least, was the crumbling monument alongside the all-but-abandoned roadway. But the World Press Congress had met in other places at other times-San Francisco, Honolulu, Mexico City, Geneva, Zurich-and, if only for a little while, journalists had shared their concerns as well as their knowledge and their dreams of a world at peace. The organization died when Williams did; as one editor put it, Walter Williams was the World Press Congress. He founded it and served as its president or honorary president as long as he lived. He believed that America could teach the rest of the world much about journalism, but he also knew that Americans could learn from others. He was a student of the press of every nation, and no one had ever been a more visible or articulate spokesman for good journalistic values and for the free flow of information and ideas across the globe. Some listen to him still. During the early 1990s, just after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, newly emancipated nations such as Romania found themselves in...

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