Monte Hayes
2025
By Ray E. Boomhower
Wearing black hoods and carrying assault rifles, the soldiers kicked in the front door of Angelica Mendoza’s concrete-block home in Ayacucho, Peru, just after midnight on July 2, 1983. They dragged away her son, 19-year-old Arquimedes, a university student. She desperately tried to hold onto him, losing her grasp when the soldiers kicked her and twisted her arm. Nearly 19 years later, Mendoza still did not know her son’s fate. All she wanted was to put a flower, a candle at his grave.
Mendoza’s agony was told with compassion and understanding by Monte Hayes, the Associated Press bureau chief in Lima, Peru. For 23 years, Hayes had covered for AP’s 1,200 U.S. newspaper and 6,000 broadcast station clients the brutal realities of state-sponsored death squads and the violent activities of the Maoist Sendero Luminoso (the Shining Path) insurgents that left thousands of Peruvians dead or missing.
To accurately report on the brutality of government forces, drug smugglers and guerrillas, Hayes often traveled long distances into remote jungles and mountains. As Nicolas B. Tatro, one-time AP deputy international editor, said in an interview with AP’s Connecting newsletter, “No other foreign correspondents entered these areas.” He was also attracted to stories like the delicate surgery to separate the legs of Peru’s “mermaid” baby girl.
Hayes was described by his friend and former AP bureau chief in Caracas, Venezuela, Hank S. Ackerman, as “the quintessential foreign correspondent,” possessing “a boundless curiosity about the countries he covered” and someone who cared deeply about good writing, Ackerman said in his letter nominating Hayes to the hall of fame.
Born Aug. 20, 1942, Hayes nearly missed out on a remarkable journalism career that saw him work at newspapers in Kokomo, South Bend and Evansville, as well as on the staff of the Miami Herald and the Caracas Daily Journal in Venezuela. A native of Lafayette, he had started his collegiate education at Purdue University in 1961, studying aeronautical engineering.
One warm spring night, bored with his physics textbook, Hayes turned on the radio and heard, he later told Connecting, “a tale of political intrigue in Vienna skillfully related by an American correspondent.” He likened the experience to being hit “by a lightning bolt. I remember saying out loud, ‘That’s what I want to do. I don’t want to be an aeronautical engineer!’”
Switching to Indiana University in Bloomington in 1963, Hayes learned about his new profession from John Stempel, the head of IU’s journalism department. “A tough former editor at the old New York Sun, Stempel took a liking to me and in my senior year named me editor-in-chief of the Indiana Daily Student,” Hayes told Connecting.
Honored for his work on the newspaper with an Ernie Pyle Award, he received a copy of Pyle’s Home Country, a collection of his columns as a roving correspondent. That book, noted Ackerman, became Hayes’ bible.
“He always kept Ernie in mind when he traveled deep into Peru or Ecuador, hoping his stories would pull in readers from Indiana, Colorado, Alabama, wherever, and that they would come away having learned something,” Ackerman wrote.
After graduating from IU in 1966, Hayes spent three years in the Peace Corps, working in the Dominican Republic as a rural community developer building a new school. “It was there that my love affair with Latin America and its people began,” he reflected in Connecting.
After two years with the Herald, Hayes left to become a freelancer, writing about the people of Appalachia. Covering for a local AP staffer in Louisville, he learned about “the nuts-and-bolts of an AP bureau, so different from newspapers,” before leaving for Caracas in January, 1975, to become the national affairs reporter for the English-language Daily Journal.
He started his 30-year AP career in 1978, accepting a job in its Caracas bureau before moving on to New York to work on AP's foreign desk. Moving to New York in the winter of 1980 with his wife, Sandra, a native of Trinidad, Hayes never forgot the advice given to him by Ackerman: “Don’t make the same mistake twice.”
By 1982, Hayes had moved to Mexico City, working under AP bureau chief Eloy Aguilar. Hayes found it an exciting time and place for a journalist, becoming so entranced by the experience covering Central America and Mexico that he twice turned down promotions to other bureaus. When the AP offered him the job as its bureau chief in Lima, Hayes remembered Aguilar calling him into his office and telling him, “You don’t turn down a third promotion if you know what is good for you.” He accepted the offer.
He took up his post in May, 1985, bringing his wife and young daughter, Melanie, to South America. “I had no idea what I was stepping into,” he recalled in Connecting.
Shortly after they arrived in Peru, Maoist Shining Path revolutionaries moved their attacks from the countryside to Peru’s capital, Hayes remembered, and there were “so many car bombs in Lima that they did not seem big news unless many people died.” He said the most dramatic moment in his 23 years in Lima was in 1997 when government commandos rescued some 70 diplomats and government officials taken hostage by pro-Cuban rebels and held for four months at the residence of the Japanese ambassador. For its coverage of the rescue, the Lima bureau received the coveted Top AP Reportorial Performance (Deadline) Award from the AP Managing Editors Association.
Reflecting on his career, Hayes, who today lives with Sandra in Sarasota, Florida, cannot forget the night when the first car bomb exploded on Lima’s streets a few days after he arrived. After dictating by phone the final version of his piece to AP’s foreign desk, he left the office for his hotel in the capital’s suburbs.
“Drivers sped wildly through darkened intersections trying to get home, barely avoiding crashes,” he remembered. “I saw people fighting to get on buses.”
Arriving at the hotel, a clerk at the front desk gave Hayes a small candle so he could make his way down its darkened hallways to his room. Inside the room, he discovered his wife and 4-year-old daughter hugging one another in bed.