Home » Latin American journalists are under siege – Carlos Gutiérrez

Latin American journalists are under siege – Carlos Gutiérrez

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Latin American journalists are under siege – Carlos Gutiérrez

February 14, 2022 12:54 pm

One morning in 2019 Lourdes Maldonado showed up at the press conference of the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Speaking loud and clear, she asked the president for help, saying she felt threatened by a former governor. On January 23, 2022, someone shot her while she was in front of her house.

His murder outraged journalists, who took to the streets to demonstrate in pain, anger and fear, and showed that the government does nothing to protect Mexican journalists. Maldonado’s deaths add up to those of José Luis Gamboa, Margarito Martínez and Roberto Toledo, all killed in January. According to the Artículo 19 organization, 145 journalists were murdered for their work from 2000 to 2021. Twenty-nine murders occurred in the three years of the current administration.

According to Darwin Franco, a journalist and university professor, this is a constant and systematic violence. “By attacking, killing or making journalists disappear, they try to silence the truths they wanted to disclose, and to prevent people from learning about them. The attack or death of a journalist has social consequences, because at that point the citizens will no longer be able to know what the journalist knew or what he was working on ”.

His words are reminiscent of those spoken in November 2020 by António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, in his speech for the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists: “When a journalist is attacked, it is the whole of society that pays the price. If we don’t protect journalists, our ability to stay informed and make informed decisions is severely impaired. When journalists cannot do their jobs safely, we lose an important defense against the pandemic of disinformation and false information circulating on the internet ”.

Interrogations and arrests
The worst thing is that the delicate situation of journalism in Mexico is not an isolated case: attacks on reporters are common in almost all of Latin America. Between July and December 2020, the Observatory on Attacks on Press Freedom received 66 reports of violations from Nicaragua alone. Many were committed by policemen, paramilitaries and government supporters. The Observatory also claims that “reports of threats received on social networks, pressure, persecution and psychological torture to try to stop journalists have increased. Being a professional journalist or human rights defender is a reason for censorship, interrogations and arbitrary arrests in public and private places “.

The Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa, which suffered particularly severely from the persecution of the regime of Daniel Ortegareleased its report on press freedom violations in 2021, recording 702 incidents of abuse of state power in the country (a similar number to 2018, when 712 cases were recorded).

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In Colombia, the Foundation for Freedom of the Press (Flip) documented 181 attacks on journalists by law enforcement agencies and 79 attacks by private individuals from April to July last year. According to Jonathan Bock, the organization’s executive director, the plight of journalists in Colombia drastically worsened in 2021.

According to Bock, this climate of violence was mainly due to the fact that some public officials have done everything to prevent the videos of the protests against the tax reform from coming to light. More than 45 people died during the protests. “Securing the print job would have been crucial, but it wasn’t done,” he says.

In some cases, judicial processes have been opened with the aim of opposing the work of journalists

For Bock in Colombia, the government criminalized social networks, putting in place a surveillance policy to determine what the authorities called “fake news”. A policy that the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (CIDH) criticized during a visit to the country.

In the Latin American region, there are old and new problems “which oblige us to keep ourselves on the alert”, explains Ricardo Uceda, executive director of the Instituto prensa y sociedad (Ipys), of Peru. Among the problems that come from afar he cites the murders of journalists committed by organized crime, particularly in Mexico. He also recalls what happens in states led by authoritarian governments such as Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, where journalists are systematically arrested and persecuted.

As for the new problems, Uceda talks about populist leaders who, regardless of their ideological positions, are fueling a violent climate against critical media with power. This is what happens in Salvador, Brazil and Mexico.

In some cases, judicial processes have been opened with the aim of opposing the work of journalists. In Peru there was a conviction for defamation against Christopher Acosta, author of the book Silver as court (Spoils of money). According to Uceda, the judge has assessed the accusation for defamation by applying standards beyond any legality, without taking into account the resources that journalism uses to inform. In Mexico, the authorities investigated Marcela Turati, a journalist, lawyer and anthropologist, for kidnapping and organized crime. Turati had shed light on mass graves in the north of the country.

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The riskiest country
Another case is that of Santiago O’Donnell, Argentina: a judge ordered him to hand over the tapes of interviews made with the brother of former president Mauricio Macri for his book. Brother. These sentences, explains Uceda, are far from “adequate standards for assessing complaints or defamation crimes”.

Darwin Franco lists three types of attacks against journalists: those by state agents, which include lawsuits, criminal charges or espionage actions, as in the case of Pegasus, the spy software that Israel sells to governments; those of organized crime, which create “zones of silence in which journalists know they cannot speak because their lives are at stake”; and internal violence within the media itself, “due to the links of the owners with capital or political power”.

At the end of 2021, Reflexiones magazine published a speech given in 2019 in France by Alicia Gómez, the recently deceased journalist and former vice president of Reporters Without Borders-Spain. On that occasion Gómez had made a picture of the insecurity in which Latin American journalism moves: “The conflicts and the political situation of some countries have made Latin America a place that is at least uncomfortable and often also dangerous to practice the profession” .

Gómez considered Mexico the most risky country for journalism. There, he said, the journalists who run the most dangers are those who work for regional or small-scale media, journalists who go almost unnoticed. “We learned of their names, their surnames, we knew if they were married or if they were taking their daughter to school only the day they were killed; the rest of the time they are small names, sometimes just initials, it’s as if they weren’t relevant. But it is these people who work for the local newspapers who are dying; it is the local newspapers, small and without great resources, that pay the highest price for journalism in Mexico ”. A reflection that can be applied to many other countries in the region, such as Colombia.

We tend to think that the journalists most exposed to this violence are those who deal with political or security issues, but this is not the case. As Darwin Franco explains, “Some colleagues who wrote about the environment were killed or disappeared for reporting illegal extraction of hydrocarbons or mineral resources or illegal logging. Organized crime and the economic interests that revolve around it are so pervasive that it could be said that there is no area of ​​journalism that is one hundred percent safe ”.

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According to the Inter-American Court for Human Rights (CIDH), violence against journalists has three effects. First, they violate the victims’ right to express their ideas and opinions and to disseminate information; secondly, they intimidate and silence other journalists; third, they violate the right of individuals and companies to seek and receive information. The CIDH insists that the state has an obligation to ensure the safety of journalists. It sums it up in three words: prevent, protect and ensure justice.

A state cannot limit itself to intervening when the journalist has already been attacked or killed. There are preventive measures useful to “combat some of the root causes of violence” against journalists and against impunity itself, says the CIDH. One is “adopting a discourse to help prevent violence against journalists and not expose them to greater risks”. Journalism must be publicly acknowledged even when it is “critical, inconvenient and inappropriate for the interests of the government.”

The CIDH also suggests educating the police on the need to respect the work of journalists and to adopt “adequate” prevention mechanisms to avoid violence against those in the profession. The right not to disclose sources of information must be respected, and violence against journalists must be penalized. According to the CIDH, the state must “produce reliable data and maintain precise statistics on violence against journalists”, in order to then evaluate effective public policies to protect them and try those responsible.

Violence against Latin American journalists creates a climate of fear that negatively affects the already impoverished democracy of many countries. It does so because it tries to hide the truth, to silence critical voices, to maintain corruption. It is up to the companies to raise their voices. The state must ensure the safety of journalists by investigating and bringing justice to those who have become martyrs of democracy.

(Translation by Francesca Rossetti)

This article was published on Connectas, a journalistic platform that promotes the dissemination of information on Latin America.

On February 10, 2022, journalist Heber López Vásquez, 39, was killed in Salina Cruz, Oaxaca state, bringing the number of journalists who have died as a result of their work in Mexico since the beginning of the year to five.


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