Former AP correspondent Chuck Green dead at 82

YPSILANTI, Mich. - Chuck Green, a former Associated Press foreign correspondent and chief of bureau in Detroit, died Tuesday of a blood disorder at his Ypsilanti home, southwest of Detroit. He was 82.

Green, a native of Houston, Texas, worked for the AP from 1960 to 1984. He also headed bureaus in Mexico City; Caracas, Venezuela; and Albany, New York.

He was hired in 1960 as a correspondent in Houston and later worked on AP’S world desk in New York before moving on to Mexico City.

Green’s work included joining itinerant farm workers in 1963 on a working tour, living with them and picking crops with them in the fields as part of a series on their living and working conditions.

He also reported the death of U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, after Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby in 1963 in Dallas.

Green later launched and managed Florida International University’s Central American journalism program.

“Chuck had great influence on journalism throughout Central America,” said J. Arthur Heise, who hired him. “We were trying to build a school of journalism and one of the ideas was to focus on Latin America and Spanish-language journalism. Chuck headed a team that spent six months down there trying to figure out what was needed.”

Green led the project from 1988 to 1998.

“We had 7,000 participations in different seminars and workshops,” Heise said. “Chuck managed it on a daily basis and did a magnificent job.”

He also served as visiting lecturer at universities in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Colombia.

“He knew Central America inside out,” Heise said. “He spoke the language perfectly. He knew everybody in the business of journalism down there.”

Green and his wife, Sylvia, both were ordained as ministers in the interdenominational church Voice for Jesus.

“Chuck is proud of and relished all he did in his career,” Sylvia Green said. “But he is absolutely the proudest and the most grateful for the love and support of his friends and family that he has had through the years. That is a gift from God.”