Simon Romero

Simon Romero is an American journalist who has been the Brazil bureau chief for The New York Times since November 2011, based in Rio Janeiro. In this assignment, he covers Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. Romero was previously the paper's Andean bureau chief, based in Caracas, Venezuela, from 2006 to 2011. He joined the Times in March 1999.

Romero was born and raised in New Mexico and graduated from West Las Vegas High School in San Miguel County, N.M. He subsequently graduated with honors from Harvard College with a degree in History and Literature. He also studied for one year in the history department at the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Romero joined the Times as a contract writer in March 1999, covering economic issues from São Paulo, Brazil. He subsequently covered telecommunications for the Times from New York from 2000 to 2003 and was a national financial correspondent based in Houston, Texas, from 2003 to 2006, focusing on the international energy industry. In August 2006, Romero was named the Times bureau chief in Caracas, moving the Andean bureau there from Bogota, Colombia. Prior to joining the Times, Romero worked in Brazil for Bloomberg News, having launched the company's news bureaus in Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro. He is also a former senior correspondent based in Rio de Janeiro for the pan-regional business magazine America Economia.

In October 2007, intruders broke into Romero's home in Caracas, stealing his computer.

Simon Romero received the Maria Moors Cabot Prize for reporting on Latin America & the Caribbean in 2015. Previously, in 2014, he won the Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for best reporting in any medium on Latin America.