Body count of slain journos [View All]

[Judi Lynn]

Body count of slain journos
By Ignacio Gomez

From 1978 to 2001, major newspapers of Bogota reported the assassination of 164 journalists.

On 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.

More:
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/58559/body-count-slain-journos.html