Michael Alfaro Returns To Cambodia With US Delegation & To Seal UK Newswire Partnership
NewsX journalist and political consultant Michael Alfaro is slated to return to Cambodia at the end of this week with a US delegation and in partnership with Buddhist Cambodia News.
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Alfaro and his team will be working alongside Sirey Muny, founder of BC News, which is closely affiliated with Samdech Dr. Yon Seng Yeath, a leading monk in the country who nominated US President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
The trip represents a landmark event for an exciting partnership between UK, US and Cambodian media, bringing news professionals from all countries in collaboration with one another.
To kick off the partnership, Alfaro, the American delegation, alongside H.E Dr. Eang Sophallet, minister of environment, a prominent Cambodian monk, will plant a peace tree on the Khnorg Psa mountain. The planting of the tree is expected to be a national event attended by senior Cambodian government officials and to take place on 2 February when the partnership between NewsX and BC News begins.
Alfaro made global media headlines last July when he became was the first international journalist to broadcast live from the Cambodian border in Chouk Chey Village. The livestream went viral notching up over 9 million views in 24 hours on Facebook. Since then, his coverage has appeared in multiple mainstream media publications including National World, The European, DailyGoat.com and The Epoch Times.
Alfaro’s return is highly anticipated in Cambodia, where he is a national celebrity. Alfaro’s arrival coincides with a spate of other US celebrity visits to Cambodia right now, including actress Angelina Jolie and Rev. Franklin Graham.
“Wow, it was nice to hear that you are going back to Cambodia again. I absolutely love it and thanks for what you have done for my beautiful country. Please travel safely,” read a comment by Hengly Pheng on Alfaro’s Facebook post announcing his return. The comment was one of over a thousand similar messages.
BC News is a local Cambodian publication that is deeply connected to Cambodia’s powerful Buddhist temples and reports on business and regional events. Muny said that partnering with NewsX and Alfaro made sense as part of a wider strategy to bring stories about the country’s white-hot economic growth to an international audience and promote peace in areas of the country that were besieged by conflict for most of last year.
“I liked the idea of working with Buddhist News from the start because its mission is one of peace and they also have a serious focus on the economy, two themes I’ve consistently tried to cover in my reporting,” said Alfaro.
The Thai-Cambodia conflict which kicked off in July 2025 and resulted in a ceasefire temporarily broken at the end of the year has been a global conflict that has received less international coverage than higher-profile ones such as Iran but which remains pivotal in the US-China Trade War and for supply chains globally. The borders between the two neighboring Southeast Asian countries still remain closed after 9 months of tensions while significant areas of land in Cambodia traversing several hundred miles are now occupied by Thai forces who claim it is their own.
On four border provinces, over 700,000 refugees in both countries, the majority of whom are in Cambodia, have been made homeless by the conflict.
At the same time, Cambodia’s economy has boomed, growing over 6% a year. Much of this has been as a result of heavy reinvestment in Cambodian industry which has seen broad benefits from increased domestic production as a result of the Thai border closure.
The NewsX-BC News partnership spearheaded by Alfaro and Muny aims to shed light on many of the inside scoops on the humanitarian and economic front that have not yet been picked up by the international press and which are relevant to international readers.
“At the end of the day, economies thrive on peace and prosperity, and there is no better story to tell about this and the resolve of a nation’s people than the story of Cambodia right now,” said BC News’ Muny. “Our news is sourced from the deepest reaches of Cambodian society since Buddhism is the one binding force in the region that transcends class and borders.”
Alfaro has a book on the border conflict in the works and has already received an offer from a mainstream publisher and news network in the States. He is in talks with one of the US’s biggest agents for political memoirs about representation for the book, which is slated to come out before the US Mid-Term elections.
“The Cambodia story is one not just of a highly enterprising population but also it’s a significant testament to the success of President Trump’s Peace Through Strength doctrine. That’s what the book is all about, primarily,” he said.
Alfaro said: “If we can bring not just the story of the border conflict but the one of Cambodia’s incredible economic rise to global audiences around the world, this is news that is going to matter. This is the story that is going to matter most to Americans and Europeans who are all looking for new angles on the Asia growth story.”