Killers stalk Latino journalists

As deputy managing editor of Colombian newspaper La Patria, Orlando Sierra used his reporting to slam crooked politicians in Colombia’s coffee region, until a January 2002 morning when a hit man shot and killed him on the front steps of his newsroom.

When gunman Luis Fernando Soto Zapasta was quickly caught and convicted, his 29-year prison sentence came to illustrate the point: No longer do killers of Latin American journalists go free, as they routinely did just a few years ago.

But Soto was freed last week after five years and eight months for good behavior in prison. He has become a symbol of the persistence of impunity for crimes against journalists in Latin America. Not only is Sierra’s killer free, but at least 13 witnesses have been slain, and the person who ordered the hit on the journalist was never arrested.

The impunity project received a boost Sunday during IAPA’s convention in Miami, as the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation presented $2.5 million to extend the program and broaden its reach to include judges, increasingly under threat in Latin America.

By the IAPA’s count, 320 journalists in the Americas have been killed in 20 years in connection with their work. While many killings are attributed to narco-trafficking terrorist groups like the FARC or Colombian paramilitary groups, others are for more-mundane print or broadcast revelations of municipal corruption, often linked to organized crime.

Despite signs of progress, the killings continue. In Mexico alone, three newspaper sellers and two journalists were killed in the past six months, and two other journalists are missing and presumed dead.

Five journalists were killed in Latin America in 2002, seven in 2005 and 16 last year, according to Reporters Without Borders’ annual press freedom report. Nine were murdered last year in Mexico and three in Colombia, where a dozen journalists fled.

Source: MH