Freedom on March in Latin America?

By: Mark Fitzgerald From the first day of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) General Assembly in Antigua, Guatemala, delegates saw dramatic evidence of the journalistic climate changes the free-press association has helped bring to Latin America.

Without prompting, thepresident of Guatemala's judiciary, Rodolfo de Le?n Molina, announced that the entire judiciary would open its doors to the press and public and work "without secrets or reservations." In a nation with a dark history of assassinating and "disappearing" journalists during a series of dictatorships and military governments, de Leon declared that Guatemala's judicial branch "signals with all our force and clarity that we seek a fraternal relationship with all communications media and journalists."

Similarly remarkable scenes would be repeated throughout the annual meeting, culminating in impassioned remarks by El Salvadoran President El?as Antonio Saca condemning courts that force reporters to reveal confidential sources. "Nobody should have impunity, including the press," he said, "but using laws to silence the press and intimidate journalists ? this is against freedom of expression."

As some 500-plus IAPA delegates burst into applause, it was not lost on them that the president of a nation that was once among the most world's most dangerous places to practice journalism had made a more ringing endorsement of reporters than they would likely have heard from the president of the United States.

As this general assembly made clear, Latin American leaders who once slammed their doors in the face of IAPA fact-finders are now willing travel to another country just to speak to them. Tribune Publishing Co. President Jack Fuller, who wrapped up his IAPA presidency at the Antigua meet, attributes much of this sea change to the Declaration of Chapultepec, a statement of principles on free press and expression that IAPA drafted 10 years ago.

"It became, in large part, embodied in international law," Fuller says. "At the beginning, we faintly hoped that would be the case, but it happened rather rapidly."

One result of that is the recent intense interest among several Latin American nations in adopting freedom of information (FOI) and public access laws, says Fuller. He notes that Argentina's Senate, which is debating adoption of a FOI law, has asked IAPA for its help in shaping the legislation.

Kevin M. Goldberg, a Washington-based attorney for the World Press Freedom Committee, saw the same enthusiasm on a State Department-sponsored trip to Argentina and Paraguay to explain U.S. FOI laws. At his lectures, the main audiences were journalists and students, but in Buenos Aires, the chief cabinet member attended one speech, and in Asuncion, two supreme court justices and three senators showed up for his talk.

"The hardest part was getting across that things won't change overnight," Goldberg says. "You don't get this law and suddenly things start popping up on [journalists'] desks. What they're going to have to do is change the mindsets [of government] and of the people."

There's also a less-welcome change underway that was just as evident at IAPA's Antigua meeting as the trend towards government openness with the press. In the year between IAPA's general assemblies, 17 journalists were assassinated, 29 independent Cuban journalists were imprisoned in a single mass raid, and countless reporters and editors were threatened with death throughout Latin America. Under President Hugo Chavez, the IAPA formally declared at the end of its meeting, "Venezuela is taking an alarming turn toward press restriction and intimidation."

"Two things are going on in Latin America, and they're going in the opposite direction," Fuller says. "In Venezuela you have the development of a classically repressive regime. For quite some time we haven't seen one like that in Latin America. It used to be quite common, and then became uncommon ? and now we're seeing it again."

Worse, the same wave of "populism with a repressive flair" that Chavez represents could be spreading in unstable nations such as Bolivia and Peru, Fuller warns. "When the Declaration of Chapultepec was adopted, it was a moment of great optimism," he recalls. "Freedom was on the march all over the world. Then economic reality kicked in. So there's this opposite trend ... and a march of institutionalization of new norms of freedom of expression."