Civil Society, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Press Freedom

GUATEMALA: Journalists in Jeopardy

Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, Jun 24 2009 (IPS) - Veteran television reporter Rolando Santiz was on his way to downtown Guatemala City on Apr. 1 when two gunmen on a motorcycle drove up alongside his car and killed him in a rain of gunfire. The photographer driving with him was wounded but miraculously survived.

Santiz was the first of two journalists killed this year in Guatemala. Another television reporter, Marco Antonio Estrada, was also shot by an unidentified gunman while working in the eastern city of Chiquimula, near the border with Honduras, on Jun. 6.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and international organisations like Reporters without Borders and the Inter-American Press Association (SIP/IAPA) are demanding that the cases be solved and the perpetrators brought to justice. But little information has been provided about the course of the investigations.

Four journalists were killed in this Central American country in 2008, according to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights office in Colombia, which also documented 68 violations of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of media workers, double the number of abuses registered in 2007.

The abuses included death threats, assaults, discrimination and limits on free access to information.

“It is definitely dangerous to work as a journalist in Guatemala,” said María Teresa López, the Emisoras Unidas radio station’s correspondent in the central province of Sacatepéquez.

López knows this all too well. “I have received threats,” she told IPS. “I was even kicked once and robbed of my equipment.” In her view, many of the attacks are the result of widespread ignorance about the important social role played by reporters.

It is even more perilous to be a journalist outside of the capital, because reporters are widely known and recognised by the local residents of the towns where they are carrying out their work, “which makes us more vulnerable and puts us at risk. Everyone knows us and knows what we’re doing,” said López.

The hazards often lead to self-censorship by journalists. “We have to take certain measures or refrain from reporting some of our information, to protect our lives,” Sandra Escobar, the Prensa Libre newspaper’s correspondent in the town of Coatepeque, near the Mexican border, told IPS.

Erick Salazar, assistant director of the Guatevisión television station’s newscast, said that working as a journalist in Guatemala is always a delicate task, but especially for reporters outside of the capital, who often run up against local economic and political vested interests. The biggest problem they face, however, is organised crime, he said.

Salazar said the “disturbing” level of penetration by Mexican drug traffickers in Guatemala “exposes journalists to danger and puts them in greater jeopardy in their day-to-day work.

“When reporters feel threatened, they resort to self-censorship to protect themselves. A journalist who dares to publish certain information easily becomes a victim of violence,” he said.

The impunity enjoyed by perpetrators of crimes against reporters fuels the violence, said Salazar. The shortcomings of the justice system are reflected by the fact that the prosecutor’s office for crimes against journalists filed legal action for only one of the 36 complaints it received in 2008.

But the media and reporters are not the only ones affected by the high levels of violence and impunity in Guatemala, said the assistant director of the Guatevisión newscast. Everyone is at risk of becoming a victim of violence, suffering the same dangers and the same lack of access to justice, he said.

Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America: 47 per 100,000 population in 2007, according to the 2008 U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) Statistical Report on Violence in Guatemala. And no one is punished in 98 percent of all crimes.

One of the reasons for this, say analysts, is that the tentacles of organised crime and corruption extend throughout the institutions of the state.

In early 2006, special rapporteur for the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights Philip Alston, on a visit to Guatemala, expressed concern about murders of women, selective killings by members of the police and the military, gang-related killings, and “social cleansing,” which he said had given rise to a widespread sense of insecurity among Guatemalans.

A network of illegal, clandestine armed security groups has been linked to violent criminal activities, corruption, drug trafficking and other organised crime in the country. “The universally agreed challenge is to end impunity – the fact that those who kill can get away with it and have no reason not to continue and even escalate their murderous ways,” Alston said at the time.

Human rights activists say the clandestine groups are mainly a holdover from the 1960-1996 armed conflict between government forces and left-wing guerrillas that left a death toll of 200,000 victims, mainly rural indigenous villagers. A U.N.-sponsored truth commission blamed over 90 percent of the killings on the army.

Gonzalo Marroquín, the chairman of the Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information of the SIP/IAPA told IPS that the association of newspaper owners and editors from Latin America and the Caribbean is very concerned about the murder of journalists in Guatemala as well as in the rest of Latin America.

“We haven’t seen progress in the investigations in Guatemala,” said Marroquín, the director of the Prensa Libre newspaper. “We are demanding clarification of these crimes. The prosecutor’s office for crimes against journalists should be strengthened and invigorated. We are concerned about attempts to intimidate and silence the press, because that leads to self-censorship.”

But Walter Juárez of the Guatemalan Journalists’ Association said the owners of media outlets share responsibility for the attacks on reporters.

Newspaper owners “make the reporters stick their necks out by forcing them to sign their stories, while failing to do anything” to protect them, Juárez told IPS.

In the meantime, he added, the authorities say they lament the murders, but never clarify them, let alone bring anyone to justice.

He said the Journalists’ Association is demanding that “these murders be investigated” and calling for “an end to impunity.”

Guatemala has taken steps towards freedom of the press, such as the creation of the prosecutor’s office for crimes against journalists and trade unionists.

In addition, a unit to investigate attacks on human rights defenders is being created, under the Interior Ministry. A law on access to public information was also passed.

But besides attacks on journalists, there are other pending challenges with regard to freedom of expression, according to Amerigo Incalcaterra, the representative in Guatemala of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“Limited access to the media and the concentration of the media in few hands hinder full enjoyment of this right, and thus the consolidation of a democratic state,” said Incalcaterra.