This week, a remarkable six-month investigation into a Guatemalan tragedy which took place 30 years ago was published and aired by ProPublica, Fundacion MEPI and This American Life. Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala, dealt with violence and redemption in ways most stories cannot.
In 1982, a squad of army commanders stormed the tiny north Guatemalan village of Dos Erres and brutally massacred more than 250 men, women and children. Thirty years later a family torn apart by the horrific ordeal were reunited.
My organisation, Fundacion MEPI heard about the story first. But our partnership with larger organisations such as ProPublica and This American Life radio programme ensured this dramatic story reached a huge audience and had a huge impact on the small republic of Guatemala. We chose to tell the story in collaboration because an investigation on a Guatemalan massacre, reported and written by an investigative journalism project such as ours would not have received the amount of attention it deserved. We felt that only a multi-nation journalistic endeavor would do the story justice.
We were lucky that one of the people in the story, Oscar Alfredo Ramirez Castañeda, was an undocumented immigrant living in the United States, and his dramatic story would appeal to US news outlets. We were also lucky that unlike other stories about Guatemalan atrocities, there is a happy ending. Oscar, who was abducted and raised by a soldier who took part in the massacre, has now been reunited with his real father, Tranquilino Castañeda.
A key part of the story was the emphasis how today’s organised crime networks in Guatemala grew strong during the lawless 1980s, when anti-communist military officers discovered illicit ways of making money to fund their brutality. The truth is that even the recent arrival of the vicious Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas, was probably orchestrated by retired military officers. The story of Dos Erres links the carnage of the past with the impunity of the present, as even now those involved in the events at Dos Erres are still afraid to speak out.
We could not have completed our investigation into the story without the help and advice of Jose Ruben Zamora, publisher of the Guatemalan daily El Periodico. An unabashed defender of his country, Zamora’s tough editorial columns have angered dark forces in Guatemala for the last 20 years. He has done something that many of his fellow citizens fear to do — he has spoken out. He has paid dearly for his criticism: In 2003 his home was raided by armed men tied to active duty military officers, and his children and wife were tied up and harassed for several hours. In 2008, he was kidnapped and disappeared for a few days, found abandoned with signs of torture in a remote area.
Reporting on this story included delving into the heartbreaking memories of Don Tranquilino, and the dark secrets of two former ex Guatemala special military commandos known as Kaibiles, who confessed and are now protected witnesses. It was worth it.
Listen to the podcast of This American Life’s report.
Ana Arana is the head of Fundación de Periodismo de Investigación (MEPI), which was launched to promote investigations and work with journalists in the US, Mexico and Central America
Louise Mensch MP has a lot on her plate today. Not only will she be at the heart of one of the biggest news stories of the day — the interrogation of James Murdoch by the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee — she’s also had to find the time to get very, very offended by a comedian, even calling for him to be sacked.
The comedian in question is Brian Limond, known as Limmy (@DaftLimmy) on Twitter.
Limmy first found fame on the web with YouTube videos and podcasts, before getting a series on BBC Scotland (allegedly, the show was never transferred to UK-wide transmission as it was seen as too “parochial”. Anyone who’s ever sat through a Radio 4 comedy slot, seemingly created with only Home Counties Oxbridge graduates in mind, will know how absurd this is).
I should admit I’m a bit of a fan. As well as his brilliant sketches, Limmy is very funny on Twitter, veering between sincerity and absurdity, engaging with fans, creating running themes (such as his excellent bedtime stories) and sometimes plain trolling.
As I went to bed last night, Limmy had changed his avatar to a portrait of Stalin and was boasting of his hatred for Tories.
When I looked at Twitter this morning, Limmy was back to normal, but Louise Mensch was outraged. Limmy had apparently put up an avatar of former Tory PM Margaret Thatcher, with red lines across her throat and eyes and the words “DIE NOW” scrawled across the picture.
Mensch was shocked, apparently.
She didn’t appear to know who Limmy was, or how he operated, but she was still appalled by him, and tweeted that he should sacked (though she didn’t seem to know who he worked for).
She also (and this is where Index comes in) tweeted that Limmy’s joke had “nothing to do with free speech”.
This is wrong. Offensive jokes have absolutely everything to do with free speech. Things that some people may dislike are at the very core of any discussion of free speech. Otherwise free speech is entirely meaningless.
Mensch does have some previous on this type of thing, having supported the idea that social networks could be shut down during times of civil unrest.
So we have perhaps forming here the Menschevik* view: “Free speech is fine as long as nothing that I find disagreeable ever happens.”
I do not ask that Louise Mensch be a free speech zealot (that, literally, is my job). But I would hope that a UK parliamentarian would have a slightly better understanding of liberty.
Limmy, meanwhile, seems to have deleted the Thatcher tweets, though one senses that this his apology is just part of a game he’s quite enjoying.
*Apologies to any surviving Menshiviks. Louise Mensch is clearly more of a Bolshevik when it comes to people who disagree with her, but sometime one must go where the wordplay takes you.
In an interview with BBC World Service’s Global News, Ai said that he “didn’t feel powerful at all” and that he was still under a kind of detention. “Maybe being powerful means to be fragile,” he added, noting that the interview itself might land him in trouble.
Asked about the responsibility of artists, Ai said that he believed it was their duty “to protect freedom of expression, and to use any way to extend this power.” Despite the restrictions placed on him for his outspoken art and criticism of the Chinese government, Ai pledged he would continue to speak out.
The artist behind the Bird’s Nest stadium, the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, was released in June after being detained for more than 80 days by Chinese authorities for alleged economic crimes.
The arrest, on suspicion of conspiracy to intercept voicemails, of the chief reporter and the former news editor of the News of the World occurred, with a certain elegance, on one of those days when the press gathers to congratulate itself at a “glittering gala dinner”.
The annual press awards of the Society of Editors even held out the prospect of a run-off for the top prize involving both the News of the World and its nemesis, the Guardian.
Among the obvious questions to be aired among the guests — many of whom have been insisting for years, with a most unjournalistic scepticism, that the phone hacking story would never go anywhere — was how the press might report this interesting and important legal development.
After all, the Sun, the Mirror, the Star, the Express and the Mail have all tried their best to keep the hacking story from their readers ever since it first broke in 2006. And when other papers have reported the affair — as the Guardian, the FT and the Independent all have — they have been dismissed as misguided or (hah!) politically motivated.
Now, it must be said, with people under arrest, tabloid editors have the option of abiding closely by the contempt of court restrictions — restrictions which when it suits them they so often interpret in the most flexible manner. So we are set to witness a rare example of the press glimpsing what it might be like to be its own victim, and acting accordingly.
I’m not about to break the contempt law here either, but it is clear by now that those restrictions alone will not be enough to keep the scandal, in its widest sense, under wraps. The same day, after all, saw a remarkable new twist in the dispute between the Metropolitan Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions over — essentially — who was to blame for prematurely burying the hacking affair in 2007. The DPP, Kier Starmer, released a long and detailed letter which appeared to contradict directly the claims on this point of Acting Deputy Commissioner John Yates.
As if that were not enough, the Met also appears to be heading towards an awkward libel trial over its assertion that a solicitor, Mark Lewis, had wrongly attributed to a police officer a claim that there may have been 6,000 phone hacking victims.
And perhaps most sensationally, the private legal actions for breach of privacy against the News of the World by the likes of Sienna Miller and Steve Coogan are not only growing in number, but are moving forward in a way that surely should alarm Rupert Murdoch’s London henchmen. All such cases are now to be dealt with by one judge, Mr Justice Vos, and he has thus far shown little sympathy for the newspaper.
In interim rulings last month Vos appeared to sweep aside a number of key points in the defence offered by the News of the World. To the suggestion that there was no concrete evidence to show private investigator Glenn Muclaire actually hacked the phones of Andy Gray (though he had accumulated all the means to do so, and had apparently tried), Vos replied that he was satisfied that “interception of Mr Gray’s voicemails was something that Mr Mulcaire was undertaking regularly”. As for the proposition that there was nothing to link the paper to these activities, the judge announced bluntly that he disagreed, and that Mulcaire was effectively a News of the World employee.
A few days ago we learned that James Murdoch was leaving London to move to the heart of his father’s empire in New York. Young James was at the helm of News International here from early 2008, so he carries the ultimate responsibility for sustaining over two years the claim that hacking was all a finished affair involving just one rogue reporter. If the time comes to hold James accountable — say, before a public inquiry — we can look forward to his return.
This week, a remarkable six-month investigation into a Guatemalan tragedy which took place 30 years ago was published and aired by ProPublica, Fundacion MEPI and This American Life. Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in Guatemala, dealt with violence and redemption in ways most stories cannot.
We were lucky that one of the people in the story, Oscar Alfredo Ramirez Castañeda, was an undocumented immigrant living in the United States, and his dramatic story would appeal to US news outlets. We were also lucky that unlike other stories about Guatemalan atrocities, there is a happy ending. Oscar, who was abducted and raised by a soldier who took part in the massacre, has now been reunited with his real father, Tranquilino Castañeda.