Alfonso Chardy, 72, helped expose the Iran-Contra affair

Alfonso Chardy, a Miami Herald journalist who anchored Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting that helped expose the Iran-Contra affair, a covert and illegal Reagan administration network to aid rebels in Nicaragua that later led to riveting hearings in Congress, died April 9 at a hospital in Miami. He was 72.

The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Siobhan Morrissey.

During a more than four-decade career, Mr. Chardy covered the Middle East as the Herald's Jerusalem-based bureau chief from 1989 to 1990 and was part of three other Pulitzer-winning teams at the paper, including coverage of a Cuban boy, Elián González, who was returned to the island in 2000 after a raid by immigration agents in Miami and a months-long court battle that became a test of US asylum rules.

Assigned to follow Latin American affairs in Washington in 1982, Mr. Chardy built a reputation as a dogged chronicler of US policy making in a region locked in Cold War proxy battles. In Nicaragua, where leftist Sandinista guerrillas seized power in 1979, Washington’s money and support had flowed to anti-Sandinista rebels known as Contras.

Congress later limited Contra military aid and then imposed a hold in late 1984. Hints of possible secret workarounds began to reach Mr. Chardy, whose last name was Chardi but was once misspelled by an editor in his native Mexico and adopted as his byline. Mr. Chardy began tapping his sources in Washington and with the rebels.

In 1985, he reported that a then little-known National Security Council adviser, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, had promised the Contras that President Ronald Reagan would never abandon them. About the same time, a Beirut newspaper, al-Shiraa, broke stories about back-channel US arms sales to Iran for the release of hostages held by Iranian-allied groups in Lebanon.

Alfonso Nieto Chardi was born on April 14, 1951, in Mexico City. His father was an accountant, and his mother tended to the home.

He learned English through courses and listening to the radio. He served in the army for six months and then worked as a proofreader and translator at the English-language Mexico City News, where an editor once rendered his name as Chardy. He credited the student protests in Mexico in 1968 and the Mexico City Olympics that year for his interest in journalism as he watched foreign reporters pour into the Mexican capital.

He retired in 2017 after several years with the Herald’s Spanish-language sister publication, El Nuevo Herald. He lived in Key Biscayne with his wife, a journalist whom he married in 1994.