Spain To Aid Probe of Reporter's Death in Haiti

[struggle4progress]

Source: LAHT

MADRID -- Spain's government announced Friday that "it will spare no effort" to clear up what happened in the March 2004 killing of Spanish television reporter Ricardo Ortega in Haiti.

The Cabinet therefore agreed Friday to declassify an intelligence document requested by Spain's National Court to determine the circumstances of Ortega's death.

On Nov. 24, Judge Eloy Velasco requested the declassification of the intelligence report on the death of the journalist in Port-au-Prince ...

Read more: http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=326265&CategoryId=14092

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I'm not convinced "Latin American Herald Tribute" qualifies as a news source -- but it's the only one I find in English and I'm including some links to Spanish press:

SOCIEDAD
Desclasifican los papeles del CNI sobre la muerte de Ricardo Ortega
24.01.09 - COLPISA | MADRID

El Consejo de Ministros acordó ayer la desclasificación de un documento del Centro Nacional de Inteligencia relativo a la investigación de las circunstancias en que murió el periodista de Antena 3 Ricardo Ortega. La decisión se tomó a instancia de la Audiencia Nacional, que investiga el fallecimiento del informador en Haití el 7 de marzo de 2004 ...
La muerte del periodista es investigada por el juzgado de instrucción número seis de la Audiencia Nacional, cuyo titular, Eloy Velasco, solicitó el 24 de noviembre la desclasificación de las investigaciones del CNI sobre el tiroteo en que cayó herido de muerte Ortega.

http://www.larioja.com/20090124/sociedad/desclasifican-papeles-sobre-muerte-20090124.html

El Gobierno desclasificará un informe del CNI para "esclarecer" la muerte del periodista Ricardo Ortega

... Los hechos sucedieron el 7 de marzo de 2004, en la capital de Haití, durante el desarrollo de una manifestación tras la salida del ex presidente Jean Bertrand Aristide, concentración controlada por la Fuerza Multinacional Provisional desplegada en el país y durante la cual se produjeron tiroteos contra los manifestantes.
Los disparos obligaron a los periodistas presentes a refugiarse en unos soportales. Resultó herido un fotógrafo del grupo de periodistas, Ortega y un ciudadano haitiano trasladaron al herido a una casa cercana al lugar y cuando, más tarde, quisieron salir, Ortega y el ciudadano haitiano fueron abatidos.

Dado el carácter excepcional de los hechos y las circunstancias en las que se produjo el fallecimiento de Ricardo Ortega, y al objeto de prestar la máxima colaboración con la Justicia, el Consejo de Ministros ha acordado la desclasificación de la documentación solicitada por el juez. Se trata de una nota informativa, de 16 de septiembre de 2005, que contiene el informe de las investigaciones realizadas sobre este caso.

La desclasificación acordada se lleva a cabo con la salvaguarda de proteger todas aquellas informaciones o datos pudieran conducir al conocimiento de las actividades, medios, procedimientos y fuentes de información del Centro Nacional de Inteligencia y a los únicos y exclusivos efectos de las Diligencias Previas que dirige el señor Juez, solicitándole que acuerde el máximo grado de protección y reserva procesal que por su naturaleza pueda adoptar.

http://www.hispanidad.com/noticia.aspx?ID=107581

November 22, 2004
The Killing of Ricardo Ortega: Witnesses Say U.S. Marines Fatally Shot Spanish Journalist in Haiti

AMY GOODMAN: We welcome you Jesus Martin, to Democracy Now! Reporter also with the Spanish TV network Antenna Tres, who went to investigate what happened to Ricardo Ortega. Welcome.

JESUS MARTIN: Yes. We went to Haiti in September this year, trying to know what had happened with our colleague, Ricardo Ortega. In the beginning, everybody felt that he was shot in the demonstration in the streets of Port Au Prince, but we discovered that he was shot an hour later. He was trying to know what happened with an American journalist and an American photographer working for The Sun Sentinel, the southern Florida newspaper he was working with. He was trapped in a small yard with the rest of the journalists. They are all—they were all trying to get help from the American embassy in Haiti, and they were waiting for the arrival of the marines, and the regular ambulance to help the journalists, and that was hard. When they—when the Haitian people who were there heard that there was a helicopter flying over the yard, there were cars arriving to the yard, they said they were Americans. The Americans were there, and then Ricardo came out from his—from the place where he was, and at that moment, was shot. His last words were—they are here. They were trying to say to the other people that the Americans were there. Then we have what—we were speaking with the people working in the yard, and this person living there said to us that he saw everything, and he saw an American car going up to the—from the—through the main street and a second car and a third car where the Americans—an American soldier and marine with a big gun turn the gun to the—into the yard and shot several times. At that moment, Ricardo was shot.

AMY GOODMAN: So, where is the story? That he was killed by Aristide supporters, where did it come from? ...

http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/22/the_killing_of_ricardo_ortega_witnesses

March 8, 2004
A Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega

By DANIEL ESTULIN

... Ricardo Ortega was pronounced clinically dead on March 7, 2004. It was supposed to have been his last afternoon as himself, as Auden said of the day Yeats died: "he became his admirers". He became a memory; disappeared into his name. It is one of the mysteries of death that it should seem to make so little difference to all but those close to the person. What has changed? There will be no more reports, interviews, books, jokes, walks, talks from that source. But what if the life and its memory we lost is already deep and rich, enough for our lifetime? What more do we want? Most will not be able to meet the person, the reporter, the journalist, the foreign correspondent they probably should not have met anyway. Such deaths are like the deaths of acquaintances we have not seen for ages, would never have seen again. A scarcely perceptible shift in what was already an absence. Except for us, in Spain, this man was ours. This person was not a person for us, not merely a reputation either. His name stood for habits of decency, ways of looking and thinking; they altered the colour of mind of those who watched and listened to him. This life of his cannot be changed by his death. Time in this context is a matter not of the clock but of chance and temperature ...

For Ricardo to live, the real has to be refracted. The inevitable refraction is a disappointment to our dream of an uncomplicated, unmediated truth, an easily accessible real life, but there is no opposition between reality and refraction.

Ricardo Ortega, a Spanish journalist with Antena 3TV, of course, is a metaphor for fear, an image of the reason Aristide cannot return to Haiti. There is superstition in such abstinence, but there is also an understanding that language, like love and like death, alters us and affirms us, clings to us and explores us; that it involves the irrevocable, and makes us who we are ...

We, the people of Spain, didn't love Ricardo Ortega in order to lose him, any more than Aristide loved his country because he had lost it. But WE both loved them most deeply in our loss ...

http://www.counterpunch.org/estulin03092004.html