Journalist Killings in Latin America: In the news article below, Panampost generously quotes the Human Rights Foundation (HRF)s opinion on the latest killing of a journalist in Colombia. However, because of space constraints, they missed a couple of ideas that are key to understanding the issue, and that I hereby share with you: Although Colombia is overall a well-functioning democracy, there are some areas in the Colombian territory that are still controlled by organized criminal gangs—whether self-described Marxist guerrillas or anti-Marxist paramilitary groups—that play an important part in the global cocaine trade system, and that routinely assassinate anyone standing in their way, including journalists like Cervantes. Similar dramas are pervasive in large chunks of land under the formal, legal jurisdiction of other Latin American democracies, such as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras or Brazil, but where actually it is drug cartels and other non-state armed groups that have effective control over those territories and that rule brutally over any person inhabiting them. While the systemic harassment and judicial persecution of independent journalists in Latin America is still more pervasive under dictatorships like Cuba’s and under competitive authoritarian regimes like those of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia, the killing of journalists, which is the ultimate form of free speech repression, is more rampant in remote territories formally ruled by democracies whose cocaine interdiction policies unintendedly lead to the escalation of violence and territorial disputes with drug traffickers. The killing of journalists will stop being an epidemic in certain Latin American regions when the politicians who run their nations from comfortable palaces and country clubs in Mexico City, Guatemala City, Tegucigalpa or Bogotá, finally put themselves in the shoes of a normal person in Juárez, Zacapa, Ocotepeque or Bajo Cauca and look for ways of tackling the profitable drug-trafficking business, without escalating the violence.
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 20:40:19 +0000
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