Freedom of the Press in the Americas: A Status Report

  
Assassinations of journalists. Drug trafficking and the threat it poses to freedom of expression. Security measures in response to the recent terrorist attacks that limit access to information. Judicial harassment. All of these factors are mentioned as limiting press freedoms in the annual report of the Inter-American Press Association (IAPA), presented at its 57th general meeting on October 14 in Washington, D.C.

The president of the IAPA's Commission for Freedom of the Press and Information, Rafael Molina Morillo, reported that 12 Latin American journalists were assassinated in the last six months. This brings the total of journalists killed to 243 in the last 13 years.

In Colombia alone, seven journalists lost their lives between March and September of this year, according to the co-director of El Tiempo newspaper, Enrique Santos. This year has been one of the most violent periods for journalists there, Santos claims. "Six journalists fled the country, 28 received threats and several others were kidnapped," he wrote in the IAPA report's section on Colombia. Despite laws designed to protect them, Colombian journalists practice what is increasingly a high-risk profession. In fact, some insurance carriers will no longer cover them.

In some countries, the main threat is the way the courts treat cases involving journalists. Judges in Costa Rica, Jamaica, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Chile have handed down harsh sentences against reporters and other representatives of the media. These decisions "have increasingly and dangerously narrowed the space for exercising press freedoms," IAPA notes. The report gives special emphasis to Costa Rica, where a court ruled against La Nación newspaper and one of its reporters for reprinting information from European publications documenting the corruption of a Costa Rican public official in a foreign post. The Costa Rican Supreme Court upheld the sentence.

Venezuela also was a cause for concern at the IAPA meeting, given the attitude of the Chávez administration against the independent media. Outgoing IAPA President Danilo Arbilla described Chávez as a "Taliban apprentice" for his efforts to intimidate his critics in the press. Former Venezuelan Interior Minister Asdrúbal Aguiar cited Chávez's verbal attacks against the media, claiming that "if the name and picture of Comandante Hugo Chávez Frías fail to appear on the front page of the newspapers, or if the headlines do not focus clearly enough on his achievements, Chávez inevitably becomes annoyed and resentful."

Recently, Miami's Nuevo Herald reported Chávez's announcement that he was willing to suspend the concessions of local televisions stations if they continued to attack his government and the process of "Bolivarian" revolution. "I remind you that what you have are concessions that I may choose to revoke at any moment," the paper quoted Chávez as warning his critics. "Don't be surprised if for reasons of national security or national interest we review the concessions held by the electronic communications media."

IAPA also warned of possible problems in the United States, if some of the new security measures and controls adopted in this time of crisis infringe on such basic rights as access to official sources of information. The organization questioned especially the policy of asking television networks to restrict their broadcasts of prerecorded videos and messages by Osama bin Laden.

The meeting also found some good news to report. One positive item was the struggle to defend freedom of the press in Peru during the Fujimori regime, with special mention going to El Comercio, La República and La Industria de Trujillo, as well as the news magazine Caretas. IAPA praised these publications for resisting government intimidation, threats and attacks in response to their critical reporting.

The situation in Latin America was summed up by Saturnino Herrero, a member of IAPA's board of directors and a representative of the Argentine newspaper Clarín. He argued that the key to freedom of the press in the region is official acceptance of the media's role as an intermediary between the government and public opinion. "Democracy in Latin America is just beginning to be consolidated," Herrero noted in a BBC interview. "It's still young, and has suffered many attacks and interruptions from politics and the military. Only now are we rebuilding the fabric of our democracies, and it is difficult for political leaders in a position of power to accept that they are not the mediators between the press and the public, but rather that the press has an informational role to play between the public and the government. This causes tension that is not always resolved."

The sum of the problems and denunciations raised at the IAPA meeting continue to pose a threat to press freedoms and freedom of expression in Latin America. But the work of it and similar organizations can go only so far in protecting this basic democratic right. The key is ensuring that journalists pursuing the free and objective exercise of their profession are not silenced by violence and intimidation. This has too often been the case, as evidenced by the painful statistics IAPA has reported.