LATIN AMERICAN JOURNALISTS UNDER FIRE

By: Mark Fitzgerald A World Press Freedom Day Special Report



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
for reporters, 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.



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 List?n
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 Ch?vez
pushed through a new constitution guaranteeing the 'right to timely,
truthful, and impartial information.' That stands as 'a constant threat
to press liberty,' says Andr?s 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 Alem?n is proposing to
kill journalists with kindness with a law that would set a minimum wage
of $500 a month for newspaper journalists - 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 Andr?s
Oppenheimer, 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 compliant courts so that a minority
stockholders' 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 re-election 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
Repblica 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 could 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 Mart?nez 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 enough
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
unit' 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.'



For a complete list of newspaper Web sites in Latin America, please
visit our Medial Links database.