Doing Journalism on Thin Ice

Early this year, the handcuffed and tortured body of Argentine news photographer Jose Luis Cabezas was dumped inside his car and set afire. He had been shot in the head. Three weeks ago, Rene Solorio, a police reporter for TV Azteca, was stopped on the streets of Mexico City by a band of armed men who put a plastic bag over his head and fired a pistol close to his ear. Just a warning, they said, to tone down his crime reporting. Blanca Rosales, deputy editor of Peru’s La Republica newspaper, which had run exposes on the army’s use of torture, was confronted by gunmen in Lima. She was threatened but spared.

Enterprising crime reporters work daily in the face of lethal retaliation in Latin America, and as often as not the threat comes from thugs allied with the ruling circles. As the debate over how to “democratize” television continues in the Colombian Congress, the government retains the authority to simply pull the plug if programming is found to fall short of its standards for “objectivity, impartiality or balance.”

All these recent and continuing assaults on the press in Latin America, some subtle, many blatant, sap the vigor of democracy and test the limits of credulity. In every case, from the southern tip of South America to the U.S. border, presidential offices issue strong condemnations, deny any responsibility and promise investigations and swift justice. That promise, unfortunately, has failed to protect journalists and ensure the integrity of their publications.

The systematic harassment of reporters and editors has allowed democratically elected but habitually oppressive governments to work in the shadows. In the last 10 years, 173 journalists have been murdered in Latin America, and in most of the cases the killers were never arrested. There is no big secret here. The killers are not spurned lovers, loan sharks or desperadoes. They are goons, some of them rogue cops, whom you’ll find hanging around officials in $700 suits who conduct business in the halls of power. Sometimes it seems only vigilant journalists can change this picture, if they survive.