JOIN USOn February 16, while addressing representatives of the the Foundation for the Freedom of the Press of Colombia and the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ) of New York, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe cited his own government as the only one that had succeeded in reducing to near zero the number of journalists assassinated per year and concluded that this feat made him one of the leading defenders of the freedom of the press in his nation’s history.
The premise is less questionable than the conclusion: in the previous year, the ‘only’ killing was of Jose Everardo Aguilar, for doing his job; in 2002, the first year of Uribe’s presidency, six colleagues met the same fate.
But the murder of journalists, as dramatic as it may be, is not a good measure of the freedom of the press. As put by ‘New York Daily News’ columnist Juan Gonzalez, the reason for the lack of journalist killings may be that enemies of the public interest no longer need to kill them to intimidate them.
A good start
The ability to work as a journalist without fear of being assassinated is a good starting point. Colombians look with envy at the record of Argentina. In 1997, when Alfredo Yabran, a corrupt businessman and influence peddler, felt that his connections in government would allow him to murder a journalist with impunity, journalists began to wear buttons of the immolated photographer, Jose Luis Cabezas, and the word justice. Four months after the first anniversary of the journalist’s death, Yabran shot himself after being charged with the crime.
In Argentina, which underwent decades of military repression, today civil society and journalists are engaged in an ongoing discussion of the meaning of freedom of the press: guarantees of its independence, free access to information of public interest, the unrestricted distribution of official government statements and releases, etcetera. In Colombia, these are secondary issues.
Between 1978 and 2001, the major newspapers of Bogota reported the assassination of 164 journalists. This number raised the average recorded by the CPJ since it began keeping statistics in 1992, when there were 72. The question is whether these 200-plus killings were enough to create the situation that Gonzalez describes, or whether Colombia is capable of restoring an atmosphere of peace in which journalism can be freely practised — without the deaths (obviously) but also with a government that encourages criticism and understands that it is a tool for overcoming for the eventual errors of politicians.
In Colombia, too, a number of ‘Operation Cabezas’ have been carried out. All of the country’s journalists published a blank column in commemoration of the 1986 killing of journalist Guillermo Cano, after whom UNESCO named its World Press Freedom Prize. On another occasion, more than three million people filled the streets of Bogota to honour Jaime Garzon in 1999. And yet no one has ever been brought to justice for ordering or abetting the assassination of a journalist.
The Colombian government credits its success to its protection programme, which provides escorts, bulletproof vests, armoured cars, and communications teams for at-risk journalists, of whom there are now 81 in the country. This programme is the legacy of the government of Andres Pastrana (1998-2002) and a response to international donors’ linkage of aid to Colombia — of which Uribe has enjoyed more than any other president in Colombian history — to measures to protect journalists.
At the end of 2002, the first year of the Uribe presidency, 560 high-profile journalists lost their jobs when the media outlets they worked for closed or downsized as a consequence of the economic crisis and the press crisis of that period.
Speaking of freedom of the press, the void left by the 2003 crisis was filled not by new media but rather by presidential television services, which allowed the government to create its own image without the involvement of the media in a mode that is now the norm in neopopulist Latin America.
The freedom of the press organisations visiting President Uribe were addressing his major concern: that certain members of his cabinet are under investigation for their possible relation to a network of government agents who were spying on journalists and on various political figures.
The 81 protected journalists are happy to enter into this category of ‘non-assassinated journalists’, but they do not feel safer now than when they could take public transportation to work and hold interviews in the street without the presence of bodyguards.
IPS