17 Feb 11 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
On Wednesday 16 February, an unidentified group threw a firebomb at journalist Rodolfo Zambrano’s home in Bolivar. He was unharmed as he was not there at the time. The attack caused damage to the exterior of his house, but firefighters were able to stop the flames from spreading inside. Journalists frequently face harassment in the South American country. Reporters without Borders has placed Colombia in 145th place out of 178 countries for press freedom.
10 Dec 10 | Americas, Mexico
As in every country affected by Wikileaks, Mexico is trying to figure out what to learn from the released cables that undress what U.S. officials think of this country and its politicians.
In the released documents US Ambassador Carlos Pascual, and other US officials, openly discuss their doubts about the effectiveness of Mexican security institutions.
But what has sent people into a spin are revelations that US agencies were the ones that had the intelligence that led Mexican Navy units to ambush and kill a powerful drug trafficker in December last year. One cable also reveals that it was US forces that hand-picked the Mexican Navy to carry out this and other attacks against wanted drug traffickers.
But for those who do not get offended by the fact that their next door neighbour is prying into internal affairs, the cables have contributed to provide the common citizen with more information on how their government is carrying on with the drug war.
The progressive newspaper La Jornada published a very thoughtful editorial last Sunday which argued that the cables confirm many truths often denied by the government of Felipe Calderon in its battle against drug traffickers. One cable revealed that there was serious in-fighting between the two government organs that oversee justice and police work. The head of the Public Security Ministry, Genaro Garcia Luna and former attorney general Eduardo Medina Mora, went at each other´s throat for most of the first half of Calderon’s presidential term between 2007 and 2009. The revelations in the cable feed into Mexico’s penchant for conspiracy theories. For the last three years rumours printed in columns by prestigious journalists talked about the fight between the two top government officials over operations, intelligence and the President’s ear, but the rumours were never clarified by the government and were always denied.
Today with the Wikileaks revelations, the public that has taken the time to read the stories on the revelations is better informed, but the government has lost face as it enters its last two years in office and confronts its worst public image. According to a recent poll by Consulta Mitofsky, three of every four Mexicans queried believes they live in a worse situation now than a year ago. The president closes his fourth year in office with a dismal approval rate of 54 percent.
Wikileaks here helped keep the electorate informed with old news, but the impact is still the same–more transparency.
The same is occurring in Bogota, Colombia, in an internal scandal in which the security apparatus of the former President Alvaro Uribe allegedly organised phone tapping of leading politicians, jurists and journalists.
The information was first revealed in documents leaked to the prestigious magazine Semana last year. But Wikileaks tops those past revelations. In one cable, it is none other than General Oscar Naranjo, Colombia’s National Police Director and a well respected official around the world, telling the US Ambassador that the phone taps were ordered by the private secretary of President Uribe, Bernardo Moreno and the presidential advisor, Jose Obdulio Gaviria. Both officials were often thought to be behind the dubious activities that marked the government of President Uribe’s last year in office.
But again, the fact that the US Embassy and one of Colombia’s top police authorities reveal those charges as strong possibilities gives Colombian citizens more information than they had directly from their government officials.
Thus the contributions of Wikileaks are opening a window of transparency in societies where common citizens are not provided with the necessary information to make informed decisions about how their governments are operating.
03 Sep 10 | Index Index, minipost
In Mexico’s northeastern state of Sinaloa, the Noreste newspaper issued a statement saying that its facilities were the target of an armed attack on 1 September 2010. The attack took place after a reporter received a threatening phone call from unidentified members of an organised gang. They fired bullets at the Noreste building and placed a banner with a message accusing the federal government of protecting two men who have been accused of being drug-traffickers.
In Colombia, on 30 August 2010, journalist Marco Tulio Valencia, the editor of the El Norte newspaper in Mariquita in southern Colombia, was the target of an assassination attempt when an unidentified individual fired shots at him. Valencia’s newspaper has reported on small-scale drug trafficking networks in Mariquita and that he believes the assassination attempt and threats could be linked to those reports.
13 Aug 10 | Uncategorized
Just a few days after several thousand reporters marched in Mexico City and other cities across the country to protest attacks against the press, the journalism community is elated to have managed to organise such a gathering. But as former editor of El Universal Raymundo Riva Palacio warned his colleagues before the march, displays of protest only from the “infantry” are likely to achieve little unless news media owners join the cause.
Leading journalists made suggestions about how Saturday’s last minute marches should be followed up. On Tuesday, Roberto Rock, the former director of the daily El Universal urged march organisers to meet Frank La Rue, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression and Catalina Botero, the Organisation of American States Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, who will be visiting Mexico this week to investigate the situation of the Mexican press.
Rock is a member of the Inter American Press Association, one of the many international groups that has requested for years that the Mexican government to change the investigative system for journalists’ murders, taking it away from provincial authorities (Estados) to the federal authorities.
Elsewhere in Latin America, in Uruguay, Judge Ana María Tellechea Reck sentenced journalist Alvaro Alfonso to 24 months in prison after he was convicted of having libeled former Montevideo provincial congressman for the Communist Party of Uruguay (PCU), Carlos Alberto Tutzó López in a 2008 book. The judged also demanded the “seizure” of all editions of the book Secretos del Partido Comunista (Secrets of the Communist Party).
In Brazil Elizeu Felício de Souza, who was sentenced to 23-and-a-half years in prison for his role in the 2002 death of television journalist Tim Lopes of TV Globo is openly selling drugs in the streets of Morro do Alemão, a shantytown in the north of Rio de Janeiro.
Images obtained by TV Globo show the escaped prisoner selling drugs, armed with a rifle and pistol, next to a city construction site. Tim Lopes was killed in 2002, after reporting on the sexual exploitation of children at drug traffickers’ “funk” parties in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas.
Yesterday in Bogota, Colombia, terrorists placed a car bomb near the building that houses Caracol, one of the country’s major radio stations. The bomb caused considerable damage injuring nine.
