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Justice and a Press Under Siege
By José Luis Simón
Latin
America is the most dangerous part of the world for the practice
of journalism. Without any international war in the region,
150 journalists have been assassinated in the last 10 years.
Of those killings, no less than 18 were committed in the past
12 months, according to the conclusions of a study by the
relateur for Freedom of Expression of the International Commission
on Human Rights of the OAS, Santiago Cantón.
To
make matters worse, "the majority of the cases of assassination
and threats against journalists have gone unpunished,"
and are not investigated "with the effectiveness, depth
and dedication" they warrant. Among
the threats against the right of free expression in Latin
America are the "insult laws" and the licensing
of journalists.
If
the above wasn't bad enough, governments in many countries
have had recourse to various illegal and anti-democratic methods
to harass the press and its journalists. The mechanisms are
varied: they range from judicial persecution to harassment,
using at times intelligence services and security forces.
And where there's no censorship organizations, it's the very
justice sector that institutes previous censorship, contravening
the constitutional rights of the nations that belong to the
Organization of American States and the hemispheric guarantees
of human rights, such as the American Convention or the San
José pact. Let's see some examples.
In
Peru, whose judicial sector has "limited
independence," the intelligence services draw up and
execute plans to investigate journalists critical of the government.
To this are "added a wave of death threats and a campaign
of persecution" which forced one journalist to seek asylum
abroad.
Something
similar happened in Argentina,
where officials of the Armed Forces were sanctioned after
they "investigated" 10 journalists who had criticized
"the security conditions and privatization" at Argentine
airports.
In
Panama, there have been numerous "judicial
actions initiated by public functionaries against journalists"
under which "gag laws" still on the books, despite
government promises to derogate them, were used against them.
The
Supreme Court in Chile
banned the showing of the movie "The Last Temptation
of Christ" and ordered the seizure of book "The
Black Book of Chilean Justice." This last act had repercussions
abroad.
Do
the worrisome irregularities described above refer to the
last cycle of authoritarianism in Latin America? Are these
and other cases too innumerable to mention historic examples
of the behavior of the security arm of the Armed Forces against
freedom of expression and freedom of the press?
Unfortunately
not. This is just a synthesis of some aspects of the worrisome
contents of the relateur's first report, that of 1998, on
the freedom of the press in the hemisphere. In other words,
this is a study, except for Fidel Castro's Cuba, of the "prime
material" of the states of the inter-American system,
where the contemporary construction of democracy started two
decades ago.
The
office of the relateur was created in April of 1998 by hemispheric
leaders at a Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile. The
first relateur, Argentina's Cantón, assumed the post in November
of last year and his first report, which he recently issued,
is what we're using in this article.
Curiously,
the very governments that today are endangering freedom of
expression in the hemisphere are those that agreed, upon establishing
the relateur's office, that "a free press carries out
a fundamental role (in human rights) and we reaffirm the importance
of guaranteeing freedom of expression, of information and
of opinion.
Those
leaders are also the ones who have just given the relateur's
office an authentic political slap on the back when they approved
"The Summit Action Plan," a document that highlights
the following as one of its objectives: "To strengthen
the exercise and respect for human rights and the consolidation
of democracy, including the fundamental right of freedom of
expression and thought, through support of the activities
of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, in particular
the recent creation of the Special Office of the Relateur
for Freedom of Expression.
Cantón,
in his first report, doesn't doubt that, "in general
terms, the recognition and protection of freedom of expression
in the continent has improved notably in comparison with past
decades, during which dictatorial or authoritarian regimes
represented a clear restriction on freedom of expression."
However,
he recognizes that freedom of expression is still threatened
because many countries "still have not created a propitious
climate for the full and effective development and recognition
of this right."
How
can you explain, on the one hand, that the region's democratic
governments have created the relateur's office and, on the
other hand, state organizations are restricting the work of
the press and its journalists?
Norberto
Bobbio, the Italian political philosopher and senator emeritus,
maintains in his book "The Future of Democracy"
that one of the unfulfilled promises of the ideal democracy,
among the doubts he has over whether democracy really exists,
is the elimination of the invisible power.
As
is known, one of the justifications for democracy is that
it is born to demonstrate the superiority of government that
carries out its actions transparently in public, as opposed
to absolutist states disposed to follow the arcana imperii model, a tradition under which political decisions,
transcendental as well as fundamental, are made by "secret
cabinets, far from the indiscrete gaze of the public."
Bobbio
adds that as a "regime of visible power" democracy
brings us the image of agorá from the times Pericles' Athens,
that is, the idea of a meeting of all the citizens in a public
place to present and discuss proposals, denounce abuses or
make accusations, after analyzing the arguments of the orators.
In
other words, a founding principle of democracy is the publicizing
of all the decisions made by the those governing.
One
aspect of Kant's work that is generally forgotten is that
even his theoretical and most abstract work contains a clear,
intentional policy that is social and political. We refer
to the Aufklaerung,
that is, to divulge the illustration,
that is, the freedom of the individual as opposed to the absolutist
and authoritarian state. Liberty, according to Kant, is the
foundation of illustration. We can call this "public
and free exercise of reason" the "principle of publicity"
and it constitutes the basis of all rational politics. It
is of such importance that he considers the "principle
of publicity" to be a public right: "The prohibition
of publicity, including its mere limitation, is the greatest
danger that can be done to the public."
The
reflections of Kant and Bobbio are useful to understand the
intimate relation between free expression, the press and journalists
and the democratic state, and to adequately interpret Cantón's
first report.
For
the OAS's relateur, "freedom of expression must de analyzed
jointly with democracy, since the International Court of Human
Rights said, 'freedom of expression is the cornerstone of
the very existence of democratic society.'" Cantón expresses
his "preoccupation for the weakness of the democratic
institutions in various countries of the region in which democracy
would not be able to encounter fertile ground to continue
its advancement."
According
to the report, "in many countries Judicial Power is incapable
of effectively investigating the facts and sanctioning those
responsible. Corruption and narcotrafficking have eroded many
public institutions. In those states, the independent journalists
are those who have been transformed into the principal instrument
of control of the authorities, bringing to public debate those
illegal acts and abuses that have evaded control mechanisms
or found in them an ally or an accomplice."
Precisely
for that reason, a mission from the Inter-American Press Association
was recently in Brazil to express its complaints about the
unsolved crimes against various journalists and its fear that
a new law in Congress would weaken freedom of expression and
of the press. The IAPA was especially worried about the unsolved
assassinations of media owners Zaqueu de Oiliveira (Rio de
Janeiro) and Aristeu Guida da Silva (Minas Gerais), killed
"because they were carrying out their professional duties,
giving opinions and denouncing irregularities to the authorities."
So,
we can't be surprised that freedom of expression, one of the
sources of the principle of publicity of government acts,
should be mocked by a totalitarian regime like that of Fidel
Castro. Even under such totalitarian conditions, there are
journalists like Cuban dissidents Vladimiro Roca, Félix Bonne,
René González and Marta Beatriz Roque willing to exercise
their right of free expression at any price.
However,
it should preoccupy us that official agencies of democratic
states are those that are illegally persecuting and threatening
the news media and the journalists who seek to bring to light
all that is of public interest, while powerful interests continue
submitting society to the anachronistic and dangerous rules
of the arcana imperii.
This
is the main contradiction today between freedom of expression
and governments with low democratic standards in a Latin America
in which some countries are about to celebrate nothing less
than two decades of democratic transition, at the same time
the region continues to be the most dangerous for the exercise
of journalism.
(José
Luis Simón is the ex-editor of the daily
El Día and of Radio Uno in Asunción, Paraguay.
He currently has a program on Radio Cáritas.)
(Posted
in Spanish August 12, 1999)
(John
Virtue, is the publisher of Pulso
del Periodismo and the deputy director of the International
Media Center at Florida International University. A native
of Canada, he spent 17 years with United Press International
in Latin America before becoming executive editor of the daily
newspaper El Mundo, San Juan, Puerto Rico.)
(January
25, 2000)
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