Watergate Inspires in Any Language

I came to this historic city on the Caribbean Sea to talk to a group of Latin American journalists about a 25-year-old political scandal that everyone still refers to with a single buzzword: “Watergate.” In the process, I learned some hopeful lessons about an ongoing political scandal in Colombia that has also come to be known by a simple but all-encompassing label: Ocho Mil.

In Spanish that means 8,000. It was the case number assigned two years ago by the Colombian attorney general to his investigation into allegations that drug lords contributed $6 million to the 1994 election campaign of President Ernesto Samper.

Watergate, of course, eventually came to mean more than the Washington office complex where a “second-rate burglary” in 1972 launched the political scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon two years later. There are many Colombians who still harbor hopes that “the 8,000 process” will bring down Samper and lead to wholesale change in Colombia’s political system--or at the very least end the corrupting influence of drug money in an otherwise proud and democratic nation.

Despite admissions by Samper’s former campaign manager and finance chairman that drug money did flow into his campaign coffers and that he was fully aware of it, the Colombian Congress voted last summer to end its investigation into the scandal for lack of evidence. Not surprisingly, the 265-member body is dominated by members of Samper’s party. Samper is now expected to complete his single four-year term, and Colombians will elect a new president later this year. The seminar I addressed was organized to help Colombian journalists better report on that campaign.

That the 8,000 scandal refuses to die is in no small part due to aggressive reporting by a young new generation of Colombian journalists, many working for historic but revitalized newspapers like Bogota’s El Tiempo. Congress may have cleared Samper, but journalists simply refuse to let up on the case. They have been encouraged--indeed, even inspired--in this campaign by the 1982 Nobel laureate in literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The author of such modern literary classics as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera” began his writing career as a reporter for Bogota’s other leading daily, El Espectador. He waxed nostalgic about his reporting days at the seminar, telling the 25 Colombian print and broadcast reporters in attendance that they must “strive to recapture the excitement of those heady days,” for their own good and for the betterment of Colombian democracy.

The seminar was the latest organized by the Foundation for a New Iberoamerican Journalism, established by Garcia Marquez in 1995 in this coastal city where he makes his home. Faculty for the seminars include senior journalists from all over the world drawn here by his stature.

Garcia Marquez asked me to come not because I’m any kind of expert on Watergate. But I was a second-string reporter for The Times during the 1972 presidential campaign, and I also helped our great investigative reporter, Jack Nelson, in the early days of Watergate, when he needed a Spanish-speaking reporter to go into Miami’s Cuban exile community to learn whatever could be learned about the four Cuban Americans who were involved in the Watergate burglary.

Garcia Marquez wanted young Colombian journalists to hear the Watergate story from someone who lived through it and through the remarkable changes that American journalism has undergone since. Indeed, as I briefed my Colombian colleagues about the campaign finance reforms that have come into effect since 1972, and about the legal access that journalists now have to probe such records, I couldn’t help but admire them for working so doggedly without any of the tools U.S. reporters have at their disposal.

There are many well-meaning Americans, I know, who think the proverbial pendulum has swung too far since Watergate, and that the press has far too much power (and too little self-restraint) in reporting on scandals like President Clinton’s alleged sexual escapades.

But, as I told my Colombian audience, the reporting we have done since 1972 has helped make Americans more knowledgeable about their political process, and perhaps even more mature about it. So mature that, according to most public opinion polls, they are now willing to forgive sex scandals as long as public officials are honest on the job and effective.

Of course, whether Bill Clinton is honest and effective is what underlies the more careful reporting about the current White House scandal. It is also what underlies the best reporting about the other Washington scandal that could go a lot further in undermining Clinton’s presidency: the heavy-handed fund-raising that preceded his reelection campaign.

When I told my Colombian colleagues that they have not heard the last about “Donorgate,” they were reassured that U.S. journalism has not lost its way and is still a model for them.