Winston Robles challenges us.

You go into journalism with big dreams, but after a time you start to settle for little victories -- like meeting deadlines and getting the governor to return your phone calls.

Then you meet someone like Winston Rabies. Here is a man who was deported from his own country at gunpoint and returned to challenge the tyrants. He saw his newspaper shut down by a dictator and his newsroom trashed by government thugs. He raised the money to resume publishing, reopened the doors, and kept his newspaper alive. Today, after 20 years, he appears to have outlasted the dictators.

And you ask yourself: Have I been aiming high enough?

A dozen of us from NCEW met Robles last January by accident -- a series of accidents, really. Many of you will remember that NCEW had planned a winter reporting trip to Cuba, a visit that was cancelled at the last minute by the Cuban government. Trip leader Bob Kittle of the San Diego Union-Tribune and Brian O'Hanlon of Media Information Tours in New York scrambled to put together a substitute. They came up with a stellar itinerary: a seven-day Latin American tour to examine the recent handover of the Panama Canal and the July presidential elections in Mexico.

The trip lived up to its billing. We got an unforgettable tour of the Panama Canal and eye-opening interviews at the American embassy in Panama City In Mexico City we got more than an hour with President Ernesto Zedillo and interviews with the three leading contenders in the hard-fought presidential campaign, as well as insightful briefings at the World Bank and Mexico's new independent election authority If you haven't seen them already, you should look up the line editorials and columns written by Tim O'Leary, Kay Semion, Marshall Kilduff, and others on the trip.

But the great thing about travel is that it exposes you to unexpected encounters -- often wonderful encounters. On our flight from Miami to Panama, Jennifer Robinson of The Gazette in Montreal found herself sitting next to an affable fellow named Juan Luis Correa, who turned out to be the publisher of an independent Panamanian newspaper called La Prensa. He was delighted to find himself among North American journalists and invited us to tour his Panama City newsroom the next night, after our official briefings had ended.

The story got even better when, on the following evening, we arrived at La Prensa's modest offices in a commercial neighborhood of Panama City.

There we met the paper's executives, including Winston Robles, a co-founder of La Prensa and the dean of its staff. Robles had been an attorney and political activist in Panama in the late 1970s, when Jimmy Carter and Omar Torrijos signed the historic treaty that would return the Panama Canal to local control. Robles, who had been deported from Panama for his political activities, complained to senators Ted Kennedy and Harold Baker that Torrijos was a systematic violator of human rights and said the United States had an ongoing obligation to improve political conditions in Panama. Several senators made a fact-finding trip to Panama, and Torrijos promised a series of reforms.

In 1980, Robles and businessman Roberto Eisenmann Jr. returned from exile determined to test Torrijos' promises. As they thought about various ways to test a government's commitment to free speech and political reform, they hit upon an experiment: Publish an independent newspaper.

They recruited private investors so the paper would be independent of political parties, and limited each investor to 1% ownership so that no faction would gain editorial control. Then they started publishing independent journalism -- stories that chalienged the subsequent regime of Manuel Noriega and linked executions to government para-militaries. In 1982, Noriega shut down La Prensa for five days, and while the staff was gone his goons trashed the office, destroying $150,000 worth of equipment. Robles and Eisenmann raised the money for new equipment and resumed publication. In 1987, Noriega shut the paper for six months, and in 1988 he shut it again for more than a year. When the staff returned the office was in ruins.

Each time, Robles and Eisenmann went back to their investors, raised new funds, and resumed publication. Today the paper is thriving and, with a circulation of 38,000, is the second-biggest in Panama.

I'm not fluent in Spanish, and even if I were I couldn't give you an exhaustive critique of La Prensa. But I can report that its newsroom has the palpable energy of journalists who take chances and produce journalism that matters. This is a society where everything is at risk -- free speech, civil liberties, democracy, personal safety itself -- and where journalists make a difference in how the big story is going to come out.

It made me think how lucky journalists are in the United States, with a government of checks and balances and a Constitution with the First Amendment. But it also made me think how lazy we've become, and how seldom we use these privileges to put ourselves at risk and produce journalism that makes a difference in how the story comes out.

Robles and his staff say that Panama has made great strides since Noriega's forced departure in 1989. The country has staged two presidential elections in which the voting was transparent, the opposition won, and the incumbent ceded power peacefully. The Panamanian congress recently repealed the nation's press gag law and is considering legislation that would establish a host of free-speech guarantees.

Yet that palpable sense of risk and struggle still pervades La Prensa's newsroom.

"Newspapers collect information and give it to the public," Robles told us, drawing on an ever-present cigarette. "Governments don't like that. This is what makes newspapers dangerous."

You travel abroad to learn about foreign places, but sometimes you wind up learning more about home. When was the last time your governor tried to shut down a newspaper? When was the last time someone you know described a newspaper as dangerous?

NCEW member David G. Hage, an editorial writer for the Minneapotis Star Tribune, chairs NCEW's international Affairs Committee. His e-mail address is [e-mail]