John Quiñones: 1952—: Broadcast Journalist

In 1982 Quiñones joined the ABC network news division as a general assignment correspondent for World News Tonight and other ABC News programs. His base in Miami, Florida, enabled him to cover Latin American stories that were unavailable to other journalists. Throughout the 1980s he produced analyses of the civil war in El Salvador and the economic crises and political scandals in Argentina. In 1986 Quiñones covered the space shuttle Challenger disaster from Cape Canaveral, Florida. During 1988 he filed more than 50 reports from Panama City, Panama, where the U.S. government was attempting to overthrow General Manuel Noriega. Quiñones was one of very few American journalists who was allowed to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in December of 1989.

Other Quiñones news stories of the 1980s included the explosion aboard the USS Iowa, the execution of convicted serial killer Ted Bundy, and the Florida gun control debates for World News Tonight With Peter Jennings. He was a correspondent for the 1988 ABC special America's Kids: Why They Flunk. Quiñones won his first national Emmy Award in April of 1990 for his anchoring of the ABC News special documentary Burning Questions, The Poisoning of America, broadcast in September of 1988. He won another national Emmy Award in 1990 for his story on Venezuela's threatened Yanomamo Indians, "Window in the Past."

In 1990 Quiñones followed the "throwaway" street children of Bogotá, Colombia, into the sewers beneath that city. His report entitled "To Save the Children" garnered him a World Hunger Media Award, a Gabriel Award, and a citation from the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards in 1991. Later that season Quiñones followed up with a report on the violent treatment of thousands of homeless children by police in Guatemala.