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Journalists under fire

With methods as brutal as murder and as subtle as a tax audit, a multitude of enemies assaults the Latin American press.

By Mark Fitzgerald

Democracy is proving to be no guarantee of a free press in Latin America. Nearly every Latin American nation now has a government that came to power in democratic elections. Yet journalists, publishers, and international organizations say in many ways it has never been a more dangerous time to exercise freedom of the press in the hemisphere. "It is still open season on journalists in the Americas," the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) concluded at its recent meeting in Cancun, Mexico, after surveying the last six months of press developments.

Open season is an apt metaphor because journalists are literally hunted in some parts of Latin America. Consider Colombia. In its just-released report on working conditions worldwide, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Colombia in 1999 was the third most-dangerous nation to be a reporter, behind only Sierra Leone, where there was no functioning government at all last year, and Yugoslavia, which was in the midst of a bombing war.

Since October, seven journalists have been killed in Colombia, 14 have been kidnapped, and a growing number have been forced to flee the country, including Francisco Santos, editor of the nation's largest newspaper, El Tiempo. (See story.)

Colombia is by far the bloodiest country, but it has no monopoly on violence against the press. In the last year, journalists have been killed in Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay. But violence is only the most malevolent face of a repression that takes much more subtle forms throughout the region, journalists say. Latin American governments are increasingly using the mechanisms of democracy against the press.

"We have been facing for some time the rise of legislation restricting press freedom — appearing virtually simultaneously in different countries of the Americas," says Rafael Molina, director of Listin Diario in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and chairman of the IAPA's committee on freedom of the press. "Under the pretext of regulating and guaranteeing press freedom, the new measures limit and curb the right of citizens to inform and be informed within the legal framework of their respective countries."

A favorite tactic of governments is to hamstring the press by declaring new "rights" for their citizens. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez pushed through a new constitution guaranteeing the "right to timely, truthful, and impartial information." That stands as "a constant threat to press liberty," says Andrés Mata, publisher of El Universal in Caracas, Venezuela, and head of the Venezuela Publishers Association. "The fear of censorship is increasing day after day."

In Ecuador, a new "consumer protection" law forbids the publication of ads that are "false, deceptive, or abusive," and a proposed campaign-financing law allows the government to shut down any news medium that fails to report within 30 days of an election how much ad money it received from political parties. A common denominator in both countries, the IAPA says, is the government's assumption of the job to determine what is "truthful" or "abusive."

Some other maneuvers against the press can be quite inventive. Vexed by press criticism, Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Alemán is proposing to kill journalists with kindness with a law that would set a minimum wage of $500 a month for newspaper journalist — in a country where teachers never make more than $80 monthly, and physicians no more than $300. The Latin American Federation of Journalists, which generally supports livable wages for the region's underpaid newspeople, says the effect of the law would be to force layoffs of journalists and even run some smaller news organizations out of business.

These anti-press initiatives from nominal democracies should not surprise anyone, experts in Latin America say. "The reality is that in much of Latin America we have elected despotisms," says Andrés Openheimer, a columnist for The Miami Herald and author of several books on the region.

A good example is Peru, where President Alberto Fujimori, who once declared a coup against himself as a way of dissolving a troublesome Congress, was running for an unprecedented third term in an election that was to take place yesterday. Peruvians have begun to talk about the election as a fraude ambiental, or environment of fraud, Oppenheimer says. "In other words, the votes are not necessarily fraudulent, but the environment in which the election is held, is," he says.

Fujimori is proving a master of repressing the press while appearing democratic. "Everything he does always has a veneer of legality about it," says Edward Seaton, a past president of IAPA and editor in chief and president of The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury.

Last year, Fujimori engineered the government takeover of the nation's biggest TV station by stripping its owner of Peruvian citizenship. Within the last three weeks, Fujimori targeted the nation's leading newspaper, El Comercio, for something similar, says its editor in chief, Hugo Luis Guerra. He told the IAPA in Cancun that the government intends to use its influence in the complaint courts so that a minority stockholder's lawsuit leads to the installation of pro-Fujimori ownership at the family-owned paper — which in February published an investigative report documenting that some 1 million signatures in the president's reelection petition were forged.

Peru's National Intelligence Service has wiretapped newspaper offices and created pro-government papers to smear opposition journalists — and one Sunday last December even sent its agents to seize all copies of the magazine section of La Republica as the supplement was delivered to newsstands. "The government uses subtle methods of intimidation, manipulation, and disinformation," El Comercio's Guerra says.

Threatening, with 'impunity'

Just as often, journalists face a mixture of the subtle and the brutal. In democratizing Mexico, for instance, the press has never been more independent, and the government in 1996 abandoned, officially at least, its long practice of subsidizing favorable news coverage by spending heavily on ads. Yet, according to the Manuel Buendia Foundation — named for the Excelsior columnist murdered in the 1980s — physical attacks and death threats against journalists have reached the highest levels ever reported in the last four years. "It is all part of the logic of the breakdown of the Mexican political system, from domination by the PRI [the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party] to a system we would call 'Mafia capitalism'," says Carlos Ramirez, columnist for El Universal in Mexico City. "Mexico suffers from the Soviet syndrome in that those who worked in the black market system now have to find new places in the new system."

As in Russia, that often means former and present law-enforcement figures finding employment in crime: murders and kidnapping for hire, and, above all, narcotics trafficking. Drug gangs angry about investigative coverage are suspected in most of the unsolved murders of journalists in Mexico. The well-known involvement of police and, occasionally, even military officers in drug trafficking leaves journalists in a precarious spot, Ramirez notes, adding, "When journalists are threatened, they get offers of protection from the police — who are the top suspects in many of the threats."

The languishment of unsolved murder cases is a source of particular frustration for journalists. Sometimes even confessions are not enough to get justice. A man who confessed to stabbing to death magazine reporter Luis Robert Cruz Martínez later escaped from jail, apparently with the help of a guard. He was recaptured in Arizona, but the Mexican government has not yet asked for his extradition.

"The government does not act very actively in cases of attacks against the press. This shows where their sympathies lie," El Universal 's Ramirez says.

Official apathy — encouraging the feeling that journalists can be threatened, injured, or killed without consequence — is common throughout Latin America that it has a one-word nickname: impunity.

IAPA President Tony Pederson, vice president and managing editor of the Houston Chronicle, says the association is fighting against impunity not only by focusing frequent attention on unsolved cases but by recently creating a "rapid-response unity" of four Latin Americans who investigate crimes against journalists. Already, it is investigating nine murders. IAPA has also created an "Impunity No More!" Web site at http://www.modernmethod.com/impunity/toplevel/indexE.htm.

What keeps Latin American journalists investigating and reporting on subjects that could get them killed? "You feel like it's your mission to go and risk everything," explains Maria Cristina Caballeros, a reporter for the Colombian magazine Semana, who undertook long horseback rides into the jungles to interview the military leader of the biggest left-wing guerrilla group, and then the leader of the major right-wing paramilitary force.

"I know I've assumed huge risks," Caballeros says from Harvard University, where she is writing a book on Colombia. "The only protection I've ever had is my guardian angel."

[Editor's note: Ms. Caballeros is a 1991 World Press Institute fellow.]