Tracking Down Killers of Journalists p.

By: Debra Gersh

CPJ report says not enough is done in the United States to pursue the murderers of foreign-born journalists

WHEN ARIZONA REPUBLIC investigative reporter Don Bolles was murdered in 1976, the mainstream press rallied and pressed authorities to find his killers.
Similar action took place after the murder of Cuban-born New York journalist Manuel de Dios Unanue, who reportedly was killed in retaliation for his hard-hitting stories identifying and denouncing drug dealers.
Yet since 1976, five Vietnamese journalists working in the United States have been killed, apparently for political reasons, and all their cases remain unsolved despite the fact that anti-communist groups have claimed responsibility for two of the cases, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The CPJ found a number of similar features in all the attacks on Vietnamese journalists, including the fact that they all had been denounced as communist sympathizers by the right-wing Vietnamese press and most of them had been personally threatened by "right-wing groups with murky connections to organized crime," which in at least two cases have taken credit for the act.
"The vigorous international investigation into the killing of Manuel de Dios Unanue stands in stark contrast to what many Vietnamese-Americans, including prominent journalists, believe is a lack of effort on the part of law enforcement officials to protect them," the CPJ reported, adding that it is "deeply concerned that the plight of Vietnamese journalists in America is underreported by the mainstream media and underinvestigated by law enforcement officials."
The CPJ conclusions come from its latest report, "Silenced by Death: Journalists Killed in the United States (1976-1993)."
Using the murder of Bolles as a starting point, the CPJ found that in the past 15 years, 13 journalists, including Bolles, were killed in the United States and all but one seem to have been specifically targeted because of their reporting.
The CPJ report also found "threats and physical attacks that breed an atmosphere of fear and intimidation" for foreign-born journalists, who face these special dangers from their own communities.
While the United States may be "one of the safest places for mainstream journalists to write and speak freely . . . for immigrant journalists, the dangers they left behind often find them here," according to the CPJ.
Nine of the 13 journalists killed since 1976 were foreign-born and were "apparently targeted by members of their ethnic communities because of their political views or expos?s," CPJ reported. The nine break down as follows: one Hispanic, two Haitians, five Vietnamese and one Chinese.
The four American journalists killed include Bolles; radio talk-show host Alan Berg; Maurice Williams, who was killed while covering the armed take-over of buildings in Washington; and free-lance journalist Danny Casolaro.
Although Casolaro's death was classified a suicide, and a special counsel for the Department of Justice has just released a report backing up that determination, the CPJ believes that he may have been killed because of a story he was investigating. (See Page 9.)
The committee has called on Attorney General Janet Reno to "follow up on her promise during her Senate confirmation hearings to fully investigate" Casolaro's death.