I was stranded in the Miami airport in November 2022 when I met two incredible journalists en route to the annual Congress of Latin American Investigative Reporters (called COLPIN, for its initials in Spanish). We huddled at a counter, eating empanadas and sipping espresso, swapping stories in a limbo created by long delays to an American Airlines flight that had unexplained mechanical problems as one of Florida’s tropical storms approached.
I soon learned that my new friends, Juan José Martinez and Mario Luis Reyes, had bigger problems than late flights: Both were living in exile and under threat of being jailed by their own governments, basically for being excellent journalists.
Martínez has been forced to live permanently apart from his Salvadoran friends and family, though he continues to report for InSight Crime on leaders of MS-13, the powerful criminal organization, and how that American-born street gang has transformed itself into a transnational business. Both he and his brothers, also award-winning investigative journalists, have been targeted personally and professionally by El Salvador’s elected president, who sometimes hurls threats and insults directly at them via Twitter.
“We are living in an era of increasingly lethal attacks against journalism.”
Reyes, who is Cuban, was once part of the new wave of journalists and bloggers on that island who have been attempting to do reporting under its extremely repressive government. His most recent investigation exposed Fernando Becquer, a popular island troubadour, for having serially sexually assaulted at least five women and girls (and gotten away with it). I’d read Mario’s reports featuring jaw-dropping details, but didn’t realize he’d found and persuaded sensitive sources to talk while he was in exile. (Only after Reyes’ story was published did Becquer end up in jail.)
Though Cuban and Venezuelan investigative journalists have faced terrible pressure and constant threats for more than a decade, reports I heard first-hand from Martinez and Reyes, and later from other investigative reporters at the COLPIN conference, were horrifying. “We are living in an era of increasingly lethal attacks against journalism,” Colpin leaders concluded in a statement issued at the conference, where the mood is usually more uplifting. “We are listening to testimonies of journalists who have faced aggression, who have been forced into exile, who have been targeted in cyber attacks, who have been killed or sent to prison.”
This disturbing and destabilizing trend is continuing to spread throughout the Americas—and beyond—as more repressive heads of state win elections (or just seize control) in countries where investigative reporting previously flourished. Indeed, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that 363 journalists were imprisoned in 2022—a new record, according to the data tracked by the New York nonprofit.
It is in this climate of fear and increasing attacks that some U.S. journalists are publicly asking U.S. government officials and world leaders to take strong action to support freedom of the press. Unlike previous U.S. presidents, Joe Biden has been reluctant to impose sanctions on countries that violate human rights, stomping on freedom of speech and freedom of the press by closing down TV stations and/or by threatening and jailing journalists. Biden could do much more, argues Joel Simon in an important new article published May 2 in the New Yorker.
The Committee to Protect Journalists reported that 363 journalists were imprisoned in 2022.
In that article, Simon, a former executive director of CPJ, recounts his recent visit to José Rubén Zamora, editor of elPeriódico, one of Guatemala’s most important newspapers, who is now in prison. Zamora is still trying to do his job and write critical columns while battling the trumped-up charges against him.
Simon and others argue that Zamora was jailed without any real evidence mainly because his newspaper has published scoops. In 2021, elPeriódico revealed how Guatemalan leaders had violated their own laws and overspent millions to acquire the Russian-made COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik V through an intermediary. It followed up with another story that involved “a Russian-backed mining company that allegedly delivered a carpet stuffed with cash bribes” to the Guatemalan president’s home, as Simon described.
President Joe Biden could and should push for sanctions and use his diplomats to actively pressure for the release of journalists like Zamora. “Unlike with Russia or China, where the U.S. has limited economic leverage, Biden has the ability to weaken the Guatemalan economy and the élite families that dominate it,” argued Simon, now director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.
Another way the U.S. government could help others in the press—and democracy worldwide—is by providing more support for the Reporters’ Shield Fund, an effort launched in December 2022 to provide emergency legal assistance for journalists, who are too often attacked through frivolous lawsuits. That legal fund initiative is being pushed by Drew Sullivan, a longtime U.S. journalist and leader of a nonprofit called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project that includes a worldwide network of investigative journalists. In his years at OCCRP, Sullivan has seen and experienced more than his share of threats and attacks. “We as people, as citizens of a democracy, should ask our governments to make sure that the system is fair,” Sullivan told Simon for the New Yorker.
“Journalists are the last obstacle that dictators have not been able to crush.”
I have worked with investigative journalists in Latin America since the 1990s and serve as a jurist for COLPIN’s Latin American investigative reporting prizes. Late last year I stood on stage watching as my airport friends, Juan José Martínez and Mario Luis Reyes, were among those recognized by COPIN as the authors of some of the Americas’ best investigations. I was moved to tears when I realized that they were not the only award-winners that night who had done their work from exile.
Martínez, whose good cheer holds up despite hardships, expressed gratitude for that moment to celebrate. “I would like to dedicate this award to my sources, who risked their lives just by talking to me,” he told the crowd, which included his brothers. “Journalists are the last obstacle that dictators have not been able to crush.”
