Freedom of the Press
August has been a troubled month for freedom of the press in the Americas. Here are a few examples.
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Unidentified gunmen shot and killed veteran radio broadcaster Israel Zelaya Díaz in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Zelaya is at least the eighth Honduran reporter killed so far this year amid an atmosphere that has become far more dangerous since the June 2009 coup that deposed elected President Manuel Zelaya. “The unsolved murders suggest a deeper breakdown of law and order and undermine Honduras’ desire to put last year’s political violence behind it,” read an August 27 Miami Herald editorial. “As disturbing as the journalists’ deaths has been the Honduran government’s swift dismissal of the possibility that the victims were killed because of their line of work,” charged an August 8 Houston Chronicle editorial. “After minimizing the crimes, Honduran authorities are slow and negligent in pursuing the killers,” charges a hard-hitting July 27 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The Honduran government’s minister of human rights, a newly created post, wrote the New York Times to defend its actions: “The investigations have not concluded in the rest of the cases and continue at a standard pace. Therefore, one should not talk about killing with ‘impunity’ in any of these cases, as the [CPJ] report does.”
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The government of Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner has feuded constantly with two of the country’s principal daily newspapers, La Nación and Clarín. The latter is part of the country’s largest media company. In the latest episode last week, President Fernández proposed to regulate the production of newsprint paper as a “public interest.” In other words, the Argentine government would control the supply of newsprint. The president justifies the move by alleging that the country’s main newsprint supplier, Papel Prensa, was sold to Clarín and La Nación under pressure from the military government that ran Argentina at the time. Fernández accuses the papers of benefiting from “crimes against humanity”; Argentina’s opposition issued a joint statement charging, “Like the dictators, they believe they can build an official history by censuring the press, controlling their materials and, with this new power, form an extraordinary state communication apparatus so that society only hears their side of the story.” Said U.S. State Department spokesman Mark Toner, “We have concerns about journalistic freedom all over the world and certainly, there’s a strong domestic debate occurring right now in Argentina. We’re paying close attention to developments and it’s a part of our bilateral conversation.”
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The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and National Public Radio have all recently covered Mexico’s troubling phenomenon of “narco-censorship,” in which media outlets fail to report about drug cartel violence out of fear for reporters’ lives. Notes the L.A. Times, “When convoys of narco hit men brazenly turned their guns on army garrisons in Reynosa, trapping soldiers inside, it was front-page news in the Los Angeles Times in April. It went unreported in Reynosa.” Affiliates of Televisa, the country’s largest television network, were hit by small bomb attacks in Monterrey and Matamoros on August 15. Associated Press reports about a heavily anonymized blog, “Blog del Narco,” that has quickly won a huge readership in Mexico because it reports on the cartel violence that major media outlets ignore. With nine journalists killed so far this year, journalists’ associations in northern Mexico now recommend that reporters wear helmets and bulletproof vests.
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In Venezuela, reporting on violence carries risks from another direction: the government. A court declared a one-month ban on publishing pictures of crime and violence after one of the country’s main dailies, the opposition-aligned El Nacional, ran a gruesome photo of crime victims’ bodies strewn across a clearly overwhelmed morgue. Opponents of President Hugo Chávez’s government allege that the crime-images ban, imposed with a month to go before highly contested September 26 legislative elections, is designed to reduce voters’ outrage at the country’s very high crime rates. The government at first sought to sanction El Nacional for running the photo and thus threatening “the rights to health, physical, psychological and moral integrity of children and adolescents”; the charge was later dropped.