Killings of Journalists Down, Editors Told

First, the good news: Throughout the Americas, the number of journalists assassinated in 1996 for publishing news accounts that offended government officials, drug traffickers or political insurgents has dropped precipitously.

But the bad news, as hundreds of publishers and editors of the Western Hemisphere’s leading newspapers were told Sunday at the annual meeting of the Inter American Press Assn. in Pasadena, is this:

Although dictators have been ousted from many nations, self-styled democratic governments are using subtler means than assassination to control the flow of information.

Members of IAPA, a nonprofit group working to bolster press freedoms and ensure the safety of journalists, told the newspaper chiefs that although more than 160 journalists had been killed in the line of duty in the past decade, only two journalists were believed to have been slain this year for those reasons, both in Guatemala.

Still, if strong-arm methods are being used less often, subtler arm-twisting is being employed more frequently to stifle news.

“In the old days, we had dictatorships and direct attacks on journalists,” said Julio Munoz, executive director of the association. “Now, governments put pressure on by withholding advertisements, controlling newsprint prices, raising taxes on newspapers.”

Although government and military tactics were once more brazen--newspapers that published critical accounts were often shut down--these newer methods “are just as dangerous,” said IAPA Press Freedom Committee chairman Danilo Arbilla of Montevideo, Uruguay’s Busqueda newspaper.

Country by country, press representatives rose to detail such attempts.

In Brazil, 45 pending bills would curtail press freedoms. In Colombia, government bills threaten to cancel the license of TV stations whose newscasts criticize officials. In Mexico, IAPA was able to scrap a government plan to raise import duties on newsprint from 6% to 15%. Venezuela is attempting to license all journalists.

The 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Guatemala’s Rigoberta Menchu, thanked executives for press efforts to uncover human rights violations and corruption, and for heralding the work of those who do so.

Menchu, who won the award for her struggle for the rights of Indians in Guatemala, said, “I’d often feel threatened, and I would see a journalist and feel safer.” An estimated 120,000 people have been killed in Guatemalan political violence since the 1970s.

Menchu’s father was killed during a 1980 peaceful takeover of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala, after the army stormed the compound and set it afire. That same year, her mother was kidnapped, raped and tortured, then tied to a tree and left to die. And a year earlier, her 16-year-old brother was tortured and burned alive in a Mayan village as soldiers forced villagers to watch.

The diminutive woman, dressed in traditional bright Guatemalan Indian garb, said that governments kill high-profile journalists to instill terror and that IAPA’s investigations help shed light on such practices.

Menchu, who for five years has helped hammer out various elements of Guatemala’s internal peace accords, estimated that more than 50 journalists have died there because of what they published during the country’s war.

She spoke lovingly of publisher and politician Jorge Carpio Nicole, killed three years ago by hooded armed men who ambushed him and shot him point blank, and of Irma Flaquer Azurdia, who relentlessly used her pen to criticize the Guatemalan military and call for basic human rights. Flaquer watched as her son was killed and was then forced into a station wagon and driven away. She hasn’t been seen since.

Menchu, in an interview, recalled that in 1988, she flew into Guatemala and was beaten by airport police. Reporters who had been waiting to interview her on her return followed her as she was arrested and monitored what became of her.

“There was a great risk for me. The press made all the difference. . . . That I will never forget.”

Although carnage in the profession is down, publishers emphasized that the danger remains. Luis Gabriel Cano, president of Bogota, Colombia’s El Espectador newspaper, which was founded in 1887 by his grandfather, recalled the ongoing threats.

Ten years ago, as Cano’s brother, Guillermo Cano Isaza--who had used the newspaper to condemn drug trafficking--was heading home from his office, three men pulled up alongside his car and sprayed it with bullets, wounding him fatally.

His paper had been the only one of Bogota’s six to publish initial accounts about cocaine trafficker Pablo Escobar, according to Cano.

Drug dealers either confiscated or bought every copy of the newspaper and burned them. Cano said he believes drug traffickers were responsible for a dynamite bomb that exploded next to the newspaper’s headquarters in 1989, destroying much of the building.

In the past 15 years, four Espectador journalists and two administrators have been killed.

Cano said he is accompanied everywhere by four bodyguards in two separate cars. “I go from my car to my house. That’s practically it,” he said. Telephone and written death threats continue. So does a family tradition: Thirteen family members--including three of Cano’s six children--still work at the newspaper.

“My grandfather gave an example: to operate independently and to oppose those who acted out of force.” Cano manages to chuckle when he says that he hopes to die of natural causes. “I’ve never succumbed to fear,” he said.

The killing of Cano’s brother is one of six deaths of Latin American journalists that the IAPA has spent a year investigating.