Dr. Marvin H. Alisky, 86, passed away May 23, 2009. He was a distinguished professor, journalist, commentator, and political scientist. He attended Saint Mary's University before serving in the Navy 1944-45. Afterwards, he completed B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Texas and did postgraduate work at Instituto Tecnológico de Monterey in Mexico. He was a foreign correspondent in Latin America for NBC radio and The Christian Science Monitor, being one of the first journalists to document Argentine dictator Juan Peron's persecution of the Catholic Church. Back in the USA, he did TV broadcasts for the Texas Quality Network, before teaching journalism at Indiana University. In 1959, he and his wife moved to Tempe when he joined the faculty of ASU, where he served until retiring in 1990. He was a professor of journalism and then political science, founding the Department of Mass Communication (now the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism & Mass Communication) and co-founding the Center for Latin American Studies. He authored or co-authored 19 books and more than 300 articles. He was most proud of his 1981 book Latin American Media: Guidance and Censorship. Over the course of his career, he visited every country in Latin America. In 1960, he was a Fulbright professor in Nicaragua, where he became personal friends with the heroic opposition publisher Pedro Joaquín Chamorro and his wife Violeta, later president of Nicaragua. An ardent champion of press freedom, he visited Chamorro when he was imprisoned by the Somoza dictatorship, and then in the 1980s, when Violeta Chamorro's La Prensa newspaper was under siege by the Sandinista regime, he led the outcry in America that helped ease conditions until free elections were held that made Violeta president. With his expertise about Latin America, he frequently appeared on local TV and radio through the end of the 1990s and at various times wrote columns that appeared in the Arizona Republic, Phoenix Gazette and newspapers out of state. He was active in civic work, serving on local organizations such as the Tempe Public Library Board and the Arizona-Mexico Commission and in Washington D.C. with a presidential appointment to the Board of Foreign Scholarships overseeing the Fulbright program. He is survived by Beverly, his wife of 53 years, two sons and two grandsons.