IAPA Spotlights Press Threats with Its Meeting Spot

By: Mark Fitzgerald For the 60th time, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) will gather for its annual General Assembly Oct. 23, and, as always, the parlous working conditions of journalists in Latin America will Topic One.

Because the association is meeting this time in the colonial city of Antigua, Guatemala, IAPA delegates won't have far to look for violations of press freedom. Just three weeks ago, on Sept. 28, the secretary general of the National Press Society, Miguel ?ngel Morales, was assassinated while driving on a highway out of nearby Guatemala City.

Official intimidation, violence, and assassination of journalists form an ugly tradition in the beautiful country that calls itself the Land of Eternal Spring.

Hope springs not eternally in Guatemala, but fitfully. In 2002, for instance, it seemed that the government was ready to confront the forces that allowed human rights abuses with impunity against journalists and those who suffered even worse fates -- such as Indians, labor organizers, and political leftists -- during a civil war that raged for more than three decades and ended only in 1996.

Then-President Alfonso Portillo signed a pledge to abide by the free-press principles of the Declaration of Chapultepec, a document drawn up by the IAPA. A street in Guatemala City was renamed in honor of Irma Flaquer Azurdia, a journalist who was "disappeared" in 1980, almost certainly by the military or forces in league with it. Portillo also established a "Special Prosecutor for Crimes Against Journalists and Trade Unionists."

But the election year of 2003 brought a "marked decline in press freedom," the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders (know as RSF, for its initials in French) said in its annual report on the nation earlier this year. "Past practices resurfaced," RSF said. "Human rights and corruption continued to be dangerous subjects for journalists."

In the most horrific incident, about a dozen gunmen broke into the home of Jos? Rub?n Zamora, director and editor of the Guatemala City daily elPeri?co. They bound his wife, three sons, and the domestic employees, and beat them. Zamora himself was stripped, blindfolded, and told, with a gun at his head, that he was to be "executed." They held everyone hostage for three hours and withdrew after warning the editor to "stop bothering people above."

The attacks came just a day after elPeri?co published the latest article in a series alleging Portillo's civilian government took direction from a group of ex-military figures including the notorious dictator Gen. Efra?n Montt.

Zamora put pressure on the government's desultory investigation of the incident this January, when he published the names of four men he said were involved. In August, two men, both former members of the Estado Mayor Presidencial, went on trial for the attack.

There was another hopeful sign of improving conditions earlier in the summer, when the new president, Oscar Berger, director his administration to admit Guatemala's responsibility for the 1993 murder of Jorge Carpio Nicolle, editor of the daily newspaper El Gr?fico, who had ambitions to run for the presidency.

Miami Herald Publisher Alberto Ibarg?en, chairman of IAPA's Committee Against Impunity, noted at the time that the Carpio Nicolle case was one of the first six that IAPA investigated when it began its Unpunished Crimes Against Journalists Project 10 years ago.

"The example of Guatemala represents a valuable precedent in the fight for other crimes against journalists still unpunished and an example to be adopted by other governments in the region," he said.

Yet only a few months later, on Aug. 31, police attacked or threatened at least eight journalists reporting on the eviction of peasants from a ranch in southern Guatemala. Police confiscated cameras and other equipment, and, when the journalists tried to recover their property, launched tear gas grenades at them and fired into the air.

"These police actions have had a chilling effect on all Guatemalan journalists," Ann Cooper, executive director of the New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote to the new president.

President Berger will address the IAPA assembly on Monday Oct. 24. He'll have plenty to talk about.