Jairo Mejia

Jairo Mejia is currently a US Defense and National Security correspondent for Agencia Efe, the largest newswire in Spanish. He covers the Pentagon and other major institutions in Washington on a daily basis. He started his tenure in the District of Columbia  the year before the 2012 presidential election, an event that took him to several states around the country. Covering that campaign, he started to use new data gathering tools and worked on new projects to create innovative products for Efe's online clients.

Since 2005, Jairo has worked  in several Spanish media outlets ranging from weekly magazines to TV news.

In late 2007, he was granted a position as press assistant at the Spanish Embassy in Seoul (South Korea) as part of a Foreign Affairs Ministry program to improve the relations with local media in the country. There he had the chance to learn Korean, as well as the communication environment and the new internet trends in this fast growing economy. That experience helped him to begin a new career working for Efe in its Tokyo's Bureau in 2009.

In his two years in Tokyo, he covered the deep economic crisis of the then world's second largest economy and  the once in half a century victory of the Democratic Party over the Liberal Democratic Party in 2009 general election.

In late 2010 he was appointed Efe's Korea correspondent, where he covered the transition of power in North Korea and the first artillery attack by the North to the South territory since the end of Korean War in 1953.

He experienced first-hand the earthquake and nuclear disaster in Fukushima, as he was one of the few foreign correspondents to witness from inside the exclusion zone the exodus of people in the worst catastrophe in Japan's recent history.

During these 6 years in Agencia Efe, Jairo has tried to apply new ways of gathering and analysing information in the midst of the deep crisis of the press in Spain and elsewhere.

He holds a Bachelors Degree in Journalism from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a Masters in Communication and Foreign Trade.