Who Said August Is a Slow News Month?

By: Mark Fitzgerald In the Washington Post the other day, Jonathon Martin, the writer for National Journal's "The Hotline," offered a welcome corrective to the old chestnut that August is a slow news month.

Nonsense, he pointed out. President Nixon resigned on an August day, Korean Air Flight 007 was shot down on the last day of August 1983, and President Clinton fessed up to an "inappropriate relationship" with Monica Lewinsky on a dog day in August.

Martin could have gone further back in history, of course. Charles Whitman climbed the University of Texas tower with his arsenal on an August day 40 years ago. The Boxer Rebellion was effectively routed with the Aug. 14, 1901 capture of Peking by Western forces. And Germany chose Aug. 1, 1914 to invade Luxembourg and touch off the World War that would kill 20 million soldiers and civilians.

With this August barely half-way done, there has been plenty of transfixing news here and abroad: the war and, perhaps, peace in Lebanon; the escalating toll of civilian and G.I. casualties in Iraq; a foiled plan to blow ten commercial jets out of the sky; and an arrest in the lurid and long-unsolved murder of JonBenet Ramsey.

There's so much news right now, in fact, that its static is drowning out another human and institutional tragedy underway now in our hemisphere. While the world is taking little notice, the violence against Latin American journalists -- which for years has been worryingly chronic -- is escalating dramatically.

In the worst incident, ten men armed with automatic weapons stormed the printing plant of Guyana's largest newspaper, the Kaieteur News, just before midnight Aug. 8. The gunmen ordered employees in the pressroom to lie on the floor, and began shooting them execution-style, point blank in the back of their heads.

Five pressmen were killed: Shazeem Mohamed; Eion Wegman; Richard Stewart; Mark Maikoo; Chetram Persaud; and Wordsworth Gary.

No one was robbed. The gunmen made no political demand. (Guyana has been tense in advance of presidential elections scheduled for Aug. 28.)

The motive, authorities speculated at first, may have been to keep police busy while other gang members attempted a prison escape. Police later arrested at least three suspects, but the motive of the killings is still unclear.

It would not be the first time that violence against the media was brewed from inside a prison. In Brazil, the "First Capital Command" street gang, known as the PCC for its initials in Portuguese, have periodically unleashed firebombing and seemingly random murders in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in an attempt to intimidate authorities from carrying out a plan to isolate gang leaders in a remote prison. Last weekend, PCC thugs kidnapped O Globo television reporter Guilherme Portanova, and forced him to broadcast a message protesting prison conditions.

And earlier this week, the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) said, a reporter for the Rio daily O Dia, Maria Mazzei, had to be moved with her family to a safe house after receiving threats following a series she wrote about a scheme that involved stealing corpses to defraud life insurance companies.

Latin American journalists need not be famous, nor work for large media organizations, to be touched by violence, though. Milt?n Fabi?n S?nchez labored at a small community radio station called Yumbo Est?reo in a town near Cali, Colombia.

Since 2004, S?nchez used his program to report on human rights, and local politics and crime.

On the evening of Aug. 9, the 37-year-old was standing outside his home when a motorcycle with two hooded figures sped by. They shot him three times. He died days later.

In southern Mexico on that same Aug. 9, two hooded gunmen barged into the newsroom of the Oaxaca newspaper Noticias. They opened fire and demanded to see the editor. Their shots wounded Isabel Cruz and Adri?n Cervantes, and apparently unnerved the invaders, who promptly fled the scene.

The Institute for Press and Society (IPYS), a Lima, Peru-based free-press watchdog, reported that Noticias owner Ericel G?mez Nucamendi blamed the attack on a former government secretary and Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, the state's current, and controversial, governor. The paper, he said, has had a "difficult relationship" with the city's government since it began reporting aggressively on corruption.

Aggressive coverage may also have sealed the fate of Enrique Perea Quintanilla, the founder and editor of a monthly called Dos Cara, Una Verdad (Two Faces, One Truth) that covered crime from its base in the northern Mexican city of Chihuahua.

Perea's body was discovered on a roadside south of the city. He had been shot in the head and the chest, and, the Paris-based free-press group Reporters Without Borders said, his "body bore the marks of torture." He was 50.

Local authorities said they suspect organized crimes, but others noted that the former newspaper reporter had written extensively about government corruption in Chihuahua and had complained of "harassment" by local authorities.

He was the 10th journalists killed in Mexico in the past two years.

It has been too often the fate of Latin American journalists to be assassinated in public, but die in obscurity.

We all pay a price for this, notes Gonzalo Marroqu?n, chairman of the IAPA's Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information.

"When violence predominates, fundamental freedoms are imperiled, among them free speech and press freedom," said Marroqu?n, editor of the Guatemala City daily Prensa Libre, "and out of fear of reprisals self-censorship emerges, as has happened in cities in Mexico and Colombia where organized crime has made itself felt."