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Justice Finally Comes for Perpetrator in Thirty-Year-Old Crime

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Justice Finally Comes for Perpetrator in Thirty-Year-Old Crime

One of those who ordered killings of Jesuit Priests in El Salvador convicted in Spanish court.

BY  The Progressive, September 15, 2020

See original story here.

The elite U.S.-trained soldiers also murdered a housekeeper and her daughter whom they found hiding in the Jesuits’ residence, after they had shot the priests in their pajamas on their front lawn with a Kalashnikov rifle—to make it look like the guerrillas did it.

Human rights advocates see Montano’s trial and conviction as a big, new step for international justice. But no one thinks the former colonel ordered the Jesuit murders alone, or that he was the most influential officer among those who did, according to documents and testimony.

How this senior commanding officer, alone, ended up in court was just his bad luck. Montano had lost his savings through bad business decisions compounded by an earthquake, so he immigrated to the United States, claiming he qualified for “protected” status. While working at a candy factory outside of Boston for $14 an hour, he was arrested in 2011 and charged with lying on his visa application.

The United States under President Barack Obama allowed for the extradition of the Salvadoran war crimes suspects to Spain. Spanish authorities prosecuted Montano under the principle of universal jurisdiction for crimes against humanity that its former magistrate, Baltasar Garzón, helped begin to establish more than twenty years before in Spain’s attempt to prosecute the former Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet.

The Spanish indictment names nineteen other Salvadoran military officers as having been present at the High Command meeting that approved the Jesuit murders, as well as five suspects, including Montano, who either gave or witnessed the order being given to the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite counter-insurgency unit trained at the U.S. School of the Americas. Most, if not all, of these commanders belonged to the Tandona, or the unusually “large class” of young officers who graduated from El Salvador’s Military Academy in 1966.

“The Big Batch,” as the ground-breaking Salvadoran news site El Faro (whose co-founder Carlos Dada reported Montano was living in Massachusetts) translated “La Tandona,” rose up through the chain of command to peak in their influence twenty-three years later, during the last major offensive by Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas in what was then already a decade-long civil war.

Having planned the nationwide assault months in advance, the leftist rebels simultaneously occupied parts of the capital and almost every other major city in El Salvador in November 1989—just as the Berlin Wall was starting to fall. San Salvador’s nonstop fighting led the world’s news cycles for a few days until Berlin’s crumbling wall became the lead story.

Ignacio Ellacuría, the Jesuit university’s rector, had long called out both the government and the military for their resistance to negotiations. During the offensive, FMLN cadres in different parts of San Salvador told me they would fight until the United Nations called for negotiations.

As unrealistic as this idea—then, at least—truly was, the high command knew, and the CIA reported, that one of the FMLN’s goals in the offensive was to compel the government to come to the table. El Salvador’s strongest advocate for a negotiated settlement since the start of the war and over the ensuing decade had always been Ellacuría. A prolific liberation theologian, he wrote that Catholic faith meant converting the Church into the kingdom of God on Earth.

Other victims included Ignacio Martín Baró, another university Jesuit and military critic who was poignant in fluent English on camera and Segundo Montes, a Jesuit sociologist and human rights scholar popular with his students as well as his parishioners in a rural community since renamed for his martyrdom.

By the late 1980s, in the wake of the murders of dozens of journalists among tens of thousands more killed by death squads earlier in the war, these three university Jesuits emerged as the nation’s most influential surviving critics of the military. Even worse for the military high command, Ellacuría encouraged the elected civilian government to ignore the military’s objections and finally sit down with the guerrillas to achieve peace.

The Jesuits sadly achieved their goal through their own martyrdom. It was the international outrage over their murders that soon led Congress to slash military aid by half to pressure the Salvadoran army to the table. The Cold War thaw after the Berlin Wall’s fall helped lead the George H.W. Bush Administration’s Secretary of State James Baker to change course, after the Jesuit murders, and back El Salvador’s peace negotiations. The war wound down and ended within about two more years.

The military high command decided to kill the priests as they searched for ways to curtail the FMLN offensive that had taken them, along with in-country U.S. intelligence chiefs, by surprise.

The first night of the offensive, rebel units took over Escalón Circle just up the road from the High Command headquarters and in front of the home of the U.S. military attaché and Defense Intelligence Agency liaison Wayne Wheeler, as the fighting was just outside the exterior walls of his and his family’s home.

Other rebel units on higher ground took over the even more posh San Benito neighborhood and the property on Avenida Capilla of Robert W. Hultslander, the CIA Station Chief who had previously served in Angola. One FMLN fighter later told me their objective was to take tactical positions on high ground. A top U.S. embassy official later confirmed to me and other reporters that the rebels did not harm Hultslander during the unexpected interaction.

The decision to kill the nation’s most prominent, internationally renowned dissidents was the apogee of a long, tense debate within the military over whether to continue to follow the guidance of their U.S. patrons. El Salvador’s civil war began as a death squad campaign where intelligence units working with far-right political leaders murdered suspected leftists by the tens of thousands over just several years in this small, poor nation.

But the U.S. Congress conditioned military aid to El Salvador on improvements in human rights, as U.S. military and CIA advisors encouraged the military to be more selective in their targeting and to try to keep killings of civilians down and out of the press to avoid attracting the ire of Congress.

Military operations improved, but the guerrillas only grew stronger. By the late 1980s, after years of doing it the Americans’ way, the military was pushing back. “We don’t understand them,” a Tandona colonel, Juan Orlando Zepeda, told me about the CIA seventeen months before the Jesuit murders, “and they don’t understand us.”

Colonel Zepeda said this in an interview inside the High Command headquarters for The Miami Herald in June 1988. Complaining that U.S. officials in general and the CIA in particular had “no definition of objectives.” He went on: “First we must win the war, then strengthen democracy.”

Tandona officers like Colonel Zepeda knew there was another way to go. The military in neighboring Guatemala had also faced a Marxist insurgency, but, due to its already atrocious human rights record, its military only received aid covertly from the CIA.

Guatemala’s military officers, instead of even making a pretense of respecting human rights, targeted civilians as their strategy to win their war. Guatemalan authorities denied holding even one political prisoner, as suspected leftists by the hundreds were killed or disappeared. And they embarked upon a strategy of “draining the sea to kill the fish,” by targeting civilians and ultimately committing what a U.N. commission later concluded were “acts of genocide.”

By the late 1980s, most of Guatemala’s fighting was long over. Following their lead, El Salvador’s Tandona officers, four long days and nights into the ongoing FMLN offensive, decided to change tactics. Before midnight on November 15, 1989, at least twenty officers dominated by the Tandona met inside the High Command. They voted to escalate their response and begin by targeting the Jesuits and specifically Ellacuría.

Before the meeting ended, the lead Tandona officer, in front of four other officers, gave the order to another Tandona officer “to eliminate Father Ellacuría and to leave no witnesses,” according to a U.N. Truth Commission.

The elite U.S.-trained soldiers also murdered a housekeeper and her daughter whom they found hiding in the Jesuits’ residence, after they had shot the priests in their pajamas on their front lawn with a Kalashnikov rifle—to make it look like the guerrillas did it. U.S. Ambassador William Walker for months afterward told the press and members of Congress that the guerrillas might have killed them. The fighting went on, and the Air Force began heavy aerial bombing of poor neighborhoods where guerrillas had taken positions, after prior helicopter attacks with rockets and machine guns.

Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda was the vice minister of defense and the highest ranking Tandona officer. Colonel René Emilio Ponce was the Chief of Staff of the Army in charge of all operations. He had graduated first in his class within the Tandona. Colonel Montano, his Tandona classmate now in a Spanish jail, was vice minister for public security, and he was identified by witnesses and in documents as having been one of the four officers, including Zepeda, who were with Ponce when he gave the order kill the priests, especially Ellacuría, and any witnesses.

Ponce died of a heart condition in 2011 as an unrepentant anti-communist who believed international conspiracies were behind the efforts to prosecute the military for past war crimes.

Juan Orlando Zepeda, in a joint statement with six other suspects, denied all charges. He has not been seen in public for years, but his son has defended him. “This is political persecution,” Juan Orlando Zepeda Jr. told the Associated Press in 2016, as the Spanish case against Montano was progressing. He was responding to an international arrest warrant through Interpol from Spain, which led local authorities to capture four suspects, lower-ranking military officers who were all later released. Zepeda, among others, remains a fugitive from Interpol.

“There are dark interests that possibly don’t show their faces in this country, motivated by either a hatred of the military, or a desire to destabilize the nation,” said his son.

Almudena Bernabeu is the Spanish-born human rights attorney who brought the case against retired Guatemalan Army general Efraín Ríos Montt with mixed results. By then, she had already begun the case against El Salvador’s Montano, after being tipped off to where he was living. During the trial, she said the testimonies, expert analysis, and documentary evidence presented would tell “not only the story of how the crime happened but also to establish the political context in which El Salvador was living in 1989.”

Kate Doyle is an international human rights documentarian with the National Security Archive at George Washington University who testified in the trial. “Montano’s conviction demonstrates anew that there are countries, lawyers, organizations, and victims who make up a community of human rights advocates who are going to find them and bring them to justice,” she said of the remaining suspects after the verdict.

Gun lobby helps block US from signing UN arms treaty

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Senators passed an amendment to block the Obama administration from signing any future U.N. Arms Trade Treaty in a 53-to-46 vote early Saturday morning before dawn. The measure, introduced by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., was one of dozens passed as part of an all-night “vote-a-rama” that led to the first national economic budget passed by the Senate in four years.

The gun lobby-backed Inhofe amendment requires the executive branch “to uphold Second Amendment rights and prevent the United States from entering into the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty.”

To finish reading the story, please click on the link below:

http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/03/25/gun-lobby-helps-block-us-from-signing-un-arms-treaty/

Gun Control and Genocide

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You may also read the article at The Progressive where it first appeared.

Here’s why the NRA is dead wrong about gun control causing genocide. But at least they agree with human rights groups about the horrors of the military dictatorship in Guatemala.

What does America’s gun lobby have to do with the question of genocide in Guatemala? Plenty, although not for anything they did. But for the particular ideology they bring to this and almost every other case of genocide or similar violence in the twentieth century.

Today, in the United States, the gun lobby and gun manufacturers have a joint interest in both fighting gun control and encouraging Americans to buy more guns.

At the same time, gun manufacturing executives play a greater, hidden role inside the National Rifle Association that NRA leaders like to admit, as I helped established in a piece in January on this website.

The gun lobby also shares ideological ground with a small, but vocal group of gun rights activists who, like most NRA leaders and many gun industry executives, take an absolutist view of the American Second Amendment. Their ideology has two articles of faith, and each one reinforces the other. First, even the slightest form of control is likely, if not certain to result in government seizure of all firearms. And, second, gun control itself invariably leads to government tyranny, if not genocide.

That’s another reason why the gun lobby along with many gun rights activists oppose even modest gun control legislation.

And it’s also why the NRA is vehemently opposed to a U.N. Arms Trade Treaty that human rights groups like Amnesty International strongly support.

Two seemingly unconnected events recently unfolded in March more than 2,500 miles apart. On March 18, Guatemala began an historic trial against a former military dictator on charges of genocide. On March 20, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper signed landmark gun control measures in that state into law.

What does one have to do with the other? For Second Amendment absolutists, gun control and genocide, or at least the specter of government violence, are always tightly intertwined.

“This is how it starts. ==> Landmark gun bills signed in Colorado,”@Bobacheck tweeted in Wisconsin just hours after thy became Colorado law, adding hashtags including, “#NRA #2ndAmendment.”

Colorado’s new gun control laws require background checks on private gun sales, and limit magazines for semi-automatic weapons to a maximum of 15 rounds. (New York recently passed a law limiting magazines for semi-automatic weapons to seven rounds, although it may now modify the law to allow use of industry-standard 10-round magazines as long as they are not loaded with more than seven rounds; the District of Columbia limits magazines to 10 rounds.)

The Colorado legislature passed the law three months after this past December’s Newtown, Connecticut grade school tragedy, and in the wake of two more of America’s worst gun massacres over the past 13 years in the Denver suburbs at Columbine High School in 1999 and in an Aurora movie theater last summer. Many Colorado residents along with most Americans, as recent polls suggest, see such measures like background checks as an important step forward for public safety.

But for the gun lobby along with Second Amendment absolutists, the signing of Colorado’s new gun laws –which came only hours after the state’s Corrections director was shot and killed standing in the front door of his own home—is just the first sinister step toward government repression.

“#COLORADO How are they getting away with this crap? It’s coming to a town near you. We better stand, and fight this people,” tweeted @SanddraggerTees on the West Coast, one of countless gun rights absolutists who also rang the alarm just hours after the legislation became law, using the hashtags #2A for Second Amendment and #NRA.

YOUTUBE and the blogosphere have long been full of material alleging historical connections between gun control and genocide.The videos often use dramatic music, images and language, whilethe website prefer elaborate chart presentations to illustrate correlations and, thereby suggest causations between gun restrictions and genocidal violence.

A small group of legal scholars have also written essays, often for journals at small, accredited law schools, making similar but more substantive arguments. Two such scholars, David Hardy and David Kopel, each testified early this year before the Senate Judiciary Committee, not on genocide, but on guns and gun violence in America; the nationally televised audience watching them was not informed that some of their research has been funded by theNational Rifle Association’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, as Irecently reported on MSNBC.com.

Another pair of scholars, who, back in the 1990s, were among the first to assert a connection between gun control and genocide, began one of their first law review articles on the matter in a defensive tone. The language perhaps indicates how some of their peers view their arguments.

“This essay seeks to reclaim a serious argument from the lunatic fringe,” begin Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. in “Of Holocausts and Gun Control” in the Fall 1997 issue of Washington University Law Quarterly published by the law school of the same name in St. Louis. “We argue a connection exists between the restrictiveness of a country’s civilian weapons policy and its liability to commit genocide.”

One of the NRA-funded scholars who recently testified in the Senate, Kopel, teaches Advanced Constitutional Law as an adjunct professor at Denver University law school. Kopel lists a number of specific cases in his review of a book, “Lethal Laws”, by Jay Simkin, Alan M. Rice and Aaron S. Zelman of the small but voluble gun rights organization, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

Cases where gun control led to genocide, according to the group, allegedly include Armenia under Turkish occupation, Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union, the Holocaust led by Nazi Germany, the Cultural Revolution in China, the genocide carried out by the U.S.-backed military in Guatemala, atrocities in Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. The same group along with the NRA’s longest-standing African-American board member, Roy Innis, of the Congress for Racial Equality, also put the more recent genocide in Rwanda on the list.

In the case of Guatemala, the authors of Lethal Laws focus mainly on a time several decades before its genocidal acts occurred. Even Kopel takes issue with the authors’ claim whether repealing gun control laws in the early 1950’s might have made a difference, as most Guatemalans, he points out, were too poor to afford firearms anyway. The main thing the Lethal Laws authors seem to say about Guatemala’s genocidal acts in the early 1980s is that human rights advocacy groups like Amnesty International should have advocated for the arming of victimized populations.

Such an argument would of course violate Amnesty International’s mandate. More importantly, anyone who has ever been to, or spent any time even just reading up on Guatemala would know such an argument is patently absurd. It would have only put the nation’s surviving highlands civilians at risk of even more military reprisals.

The bloody history of Guatemala includes grotesque human-rights abuses—in spite of the fact that there were significant numbers of armed rebels. The insurgents had military weapons, but they were still not strong enough as a force to defend civilians including women and children from brigade-level and other large-unit attacks by the Army.

THE TRIAL of the former military dictator, retired General Efraín Ríos Montt, for genocide is underway in Guatemala City. A U.N. Truth Commission previously documented the wholesale annihilation of men, women and children in hundreds of ethnic Mayan villages while he led the country, calling them “acts of genocide.” The abuses were carried out with CIA assistance, as was established in 1995 by journalist and author Tim Weiner in The New York Times.

In late 1990, in The Progressive, I reported how villagers in Santiago de Atitán finally broke through their own fear of military reprisals to place the photos of hundreds of loved ones who had disappeared over the previous decade on the windows and walls of the village’s town hall. It all began with one family’s photo, and soon became a silent, collective act of defiance of military authority.

Another five years passed before Guatemala’s civil war finally ended. By then, Guatemala’s civil war had been bloodier than all the other wars in Central America combined. More than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared. Leftist guerrillas committed some abuses, but the U.N. Truth Commission found the Guatemalan military responsible for 93 percent of the nation’s wartime abuses.

Gun control had nothing to do with it. Instead it was the state’s concentration of power by the military as an institutional that facilitated the abuses. Even as the massacres were still being carried out, military authorities began organizing civilians in villages whom they deemed as being less tainted by rebel ideology into military-controlled “strategic hamlets” or population centers. In other villages, where surviving residents were not forcibly relocated, the Army organized the males into the civil defense patrols and armed them with M1 carbine rifles.

Unlike the claims of Second Amendment scholars and activists, the same phenomenon of military power being the primary factor leading to genocide or similar acts is characteristic of state violence committed by other governments in previous eras.

“The history of gun control in Germany from the post-World War I period to the inception of World War II seems to be a history of declining, rather than increasing, gun control,” wrote Bernard E. Harcourt in the Fordham Law Review in 2004. Debunking the arguments made explicitly by NRA activists and Second Amendment scholars point by point, Harcourt concludes their claims “are not about history, nor are they about truth. These are cultural arguments.”

Other scholars looking at the Holocaust and other genocidal acts seem to agree.

“Perhaps the greatest source of power in an oppressive society in times of war is the military establishment that is identified with the authorities in charge,” wrote scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian in “The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” in the 2008 edited volume, Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide.

Now in Guatemala prosecutors are alleging that General Montt presided over military counterinsurgency efforts that targeted not armed leftist guerrillas trying to overthrow the government, but explicitly unarmed civilians suspected of supporting or even being sympathetic to the rebel cause.

“A woman was found hiding in a ditch and realizing her presence, the point man fired, killing her and two ‘chocolates,’” according to one platoon report from mid-1982 called “Operation Sofia” and obtained by the National Security Archive of George Washington University. The “chocolates” referred to two children she was protecting.

One former Army sergeant operating in the Quiché region, where many abuses were concentrated, told me during the war how his commanders justified such brutality. “The innocent pay for the sins of the guilty,” he explained, saying the innocents referred to unarmed civilians and the guilty referred to the armed guerrillas.

When the military confronted unarmed civilians, there was “a clear indifference to their status as a non-combatant civilian population,”later concluded the U.N. Truth Commission. The level of carnage in Guatemala was extreme even when compared to other bloodied nations in the region like El Salvador.

“In the majority of massacres there is evidence of multiple acts of savagery, which preceded, accompanied or occurred after the deaths of victims,” concluded the U.N. Truth Commission. “Acts such as the killing of defenseless children, often by beating them against walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the presence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts.”

BUT WHEN it comes to one thing, Second Amendments scholars are closer to human rights advocates than to many American conservatives about Guatemala. Back in late 1982, President Ronald Reagan, whom many conservative Republicans still revere, met General Montt and afterward told reporters that he thought the Guatemalan dictator was getting “a bum rap” over his alleged human rights abuses.

Today’s gun lobby scholars disagree. They and other gun rights absolutists fault President Reagan for supporting gun control measures including the Brady Bill mandating background checks after his press secretary, Jim Brady, was shot and Reagan was wounded, and for later speaking out against non-sporting, high-powered weapons.

But some of the same leading Second Amendment scholars also reject Reagan’s apologies for Guatemala’s human rights record under General Rios Montt.

“Perhaps the most overlooked genocide of the twentieth century has been the Guatemalan government’s campaign against its Indian population,” wrote Kopel in 1995. One reason “may be that the Guatemalan government has been friendly to the United States.”

He’s right about that.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and MSNBC Contributor. He has been covering the gun lobby since the mid-1990s, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Washington Post and Mother Jones. He’s been covering Guatemala since the late-1980s, writing for outlets including The Progressive, The Wall Street Journal and The Texas Observer. Smyth is the author of the 1994 Human Rights Watch report released on the eve of genocide, Arming Rwanda, and of the 2010 study, “Painting the Maya Red: Military Doctrine and Speech in Guatemala’s Genocidal Acts”, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His clips are posted atwww.franksmyth.com, and his Twitter handle is @SmythFrank .

Caveat utilitor: Satellite phones can always be tracked

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The original blog is posted here.

Caveat utilitor: Satellite phones can always be tracked

The Telegraph in London was the first to report that Syrian government forces could have “locked on” to satellite phone signals to launch the rocket attacks that killed journalists Marie Colvin and Rémi Ochlik, as well as many Syrian civilians, besides wounding dozens more including two more international journalists. Working out of a makeshift press center in Homs, foreign correspondents and local citizen journalists alike have been using satellite phones to send images of attacks on civilians around the world.

Without evidence, it is impossible to know whether Syrian forces tracked the journalists’ satellite signals to target the attack. And one should keep in mind that the building being used as a makeshift press center in Homs may have been known to many people in the city.

Yet the consensus among technologists devoted to Internet freedom is clear.

“Satellite phone tracking is not only possible, it’s widely used by military and security services,” one human rights-oriented technologist with experience training citizen activists in Syria told CPJ.

Jacob Appelbaum, a technologist associated with the Internet circumvention tool popular among human rights activists known as Tor, was among the first to warn journalists via @ioerror on Twitter: “No matter what – unless you ‘know’ otherwise, your Satellite phone almost certainly discloses your exact GPS location in an insecure manner.”

There are at least three ways to track a satellite phone. Tracking radio frequency emissions is one. “It is relatively simple to receive this signal for a trained technician, ” reports SaferMobile, a U.S.-based nonprofit group dedicated to helping activists, human rights defenders and journalists share information, in a blog this week pegged to the above attack.

Using commercially available tracking devices is another. “There is ample technology already on the market for doing so,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation, another, San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, wrote in a blog yesterday. Companies including the Polish firm TS2 sell monitoring equipment to track different models of satellite phones. The Italian firm Area SpA sold surveillance equipment to Syria last year in advance of the current crackdown, according to Bloomberg News and EFF.

Finally, satellite phones can be tracked through their own built-in GPS devices or weak encryption protocols. “It is very likely that the GPS location data is transmitted by the sat phone in the clear,” reports Safer Mobile. “Additionally and important as a side note — aside from revealing your location with a sat phone — the encryption used by commercial satellite telephone systems has been recently cracked.”

So what are journalists and citizen journalists to do? In an environment where normal Internet access is either shut down or severely restricted, satellite phones remain a key way to transmit and report information. For now, alternatives such as amateur radio links or — as this report from Syria suggests, using carrier pigeons — are largely infeasible replacements.

Technologists with experience operating in hostile environments tell CPJ that one should use a satellite phone in such situations only with strict radio discipline:

-Avoid using a satellite phone (or any radio frequency based device) from the same position more than once.

-Avoid using a satellite phone or similar device from a location that cannot be easily evacuated in case of attack.

-Keep the maximum length of any transmission to 10 minutes at most, then cease transmitting and change location as soon as possible.

-Avoid having multiple parties transmit from the same location, i.e. a central media center may be too dangerous to operate in a place like Homs, Syria.

Murdering with Impunity: The Rise in Terror Tactics Against News Reporters

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Original story found here.Frank Smyth Bookmark and Share

Murdering with Impunity

The Rise in Terror Tactics Against News Reporters

November 14, 2010 by

Frank Smyth is the Washington representative and Journalist Security Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. He serves as board member of the International News Safety Institute and was a former investigator for Human Rights Watch.

More journalists were killed last year than ever before. No doubt the world has become a more dangerous place for journalists, but not necessarily in ways that people might expect. The risks to foreign journalists, especially for (but hardly limited to) Western correspondents, have risen dramatically. Some of us are old enough to recall a time back in the 1980s when raising a white flag and writing TV in masking tape on a vehicle might help keep one safe. But in recent years reporters for outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Al-Arabiya have been attacked in ways which demonstrate that being a journalist may only make one more of a target.

The untold story, however, is the following: the risks to local journalists, or journalists who report within the borders of their own nation, have never been greater. In fact, the risks that local journalists face have long been severe. The difference is that, now, perhaps more Western-based international observers and groups are taking notice.

Nearly three out of four journalists killed around the world did not step on a landmine, or get shot in crossfire, or even die in a suicide bombing attack. Instead, no less than 72 percent of all 831 journalists killed on the job since 1992, according to data compiled with other figures cited below by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), were murdered outright, such as killed by a gunman escaping on the back of a motorcycle, shot or stabbed to death near their home or office, or found dead after having been abducted and tortured.

The pattern of most journalists murdered in reprisal for their work, as opposed to being killed by the hazards of combat reporting, holds true even in war zones. In Somalia, more than half (53 percent) of journalists killed did not die in anything like a firefight or bombing attack; instead, they were individually murdered. Similarly, in Afghanistan, outright homicides account for 59 percent of journalists killed. In Iraq, which by any measure has been the most dangerous nation for journalists on record, 63 percent of journalists killed since the US-led invasion in 2003 were murdered.

Atwar Bahjat was an Iraqi journalist and contract correspondent in Iraq for Al-Arabiya, a television network based in the United Arab Emirates and partly owned by the Saudi broadcaster Middle East Broadcasting Center. Bahjat had previously reported from Iraq for Al-Jazeera, the satellite television network based in Qatar and partly financed by the nation’s Emir-led government. In 2006, Bahjat and her TV crew were reporting at the site of the Shi’ite Askariya shrine, also known as the Golden Mosque, in Samarra immediately after it had been bombed. A surviving crewmember said that armed men driving a white car attacked the crew and demanded to know the whereabouts of the on-air correspondent. Her remains and those of two crewmembers were found the following day. Bahjat’s corpse in particular, according to a mutual friend interviewed by this author, bore unmistakable signs of torture.

The killing of local journalists is most common. Nearly nine out of ten journalists killed on the job, or 87 percent, were murdered or otherwise killed within their own nation. Many people have heard of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who, after her repeated exposés on human rights abuses in the Russian province of Chechnya, was shot to death in October 2006 in the elevator of her apartment building.

But how many people beyond the northern Mexican town of Saltillo have heard of Valentín Valdés Espinosa, a young general assignment reporter for Zócolo de Saltillo, whose tortured corpse was found in January 2010 after he reported the arrest of an alleged local drug lord? Or how many people outside of the Sindhi-speaking area of Pakistan have heard of Ghulam Rasool Birhamani, a middle-aged reporter for the Daily Sindhu Hyderabad, who was abducted, tortured and left for dead in May 2010 after reporting on an arranged, tribal marriage involving a 12-year-old girl? Or how many people outside of Indonesia have heard of Ridwan Salamun, a young correspondent and cameraman for Sun TV, who was stabbed to death in August 2010 while filming violent clashes between two villages?

The evidence in 2009 continues to bolster the same point. CPJ recorded a record 72 journalist deaths last year. The unprecedented toll stemmed largely from the November massacre of 30 journalists out of 57 people killed in one incident during election unrest in the Philippines’s Maguindano province. Keep in mind that CPJ figures are by and large consistent with those provided by other global monitors, including the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders and the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists, except for two possible cases. When it comes to journalist murders, CPJ only includes those cases where researchers have investigated the motive to determine that a journalist was murdered in retaliation for his or her work, as opposed to, say, a business arrangement gone bad, a land dispute, or even a love triangle. In 2009, for example, no fewer than 24 journalists were murdered that year whom CPJ excluded from the record total of 72 journalists killed because a motive in each of these outstanding cases has yet to be determined. Each year, on average, CPJ records dozens of outstanding cases with motives under investigation. CPJ’s annual figure of journalists killed worldwide also excludes murders of media workers such as drivers and translators, which in 2009, for example, numbered three.

The resulting figures still stand up under scrutiny, and they are staggering. At least 599 journalists have been murdered since 1992, according to CPJ statistics. To put it another way, a journalist is murdered somewhere around the world at least once every 11 days. Most of them were not even investigative journalists, but simply beat reporters trying to get the story. More than nine out of ten of the murdered journalists, or 93 percent, were local newsmen and women.

Unsolved Crimes

There is another trend that is even more disturbing. When it comes to journalists, the killers get away with the murders in nearly nine out of ten cases. In no less than 89 percent of journalist murders worldwide, there has been little or no prosecution whatsoever. Moreover, only in four percent of journalist murder cases has full prosecution occurred, which in most cases means that both the assassins and the masterminds who ordered or hired them, have been brought to justice.

In 2005, a judge in Nicaragua found a local politician guilty of the murder of journalist Maria José Bravo, a correspondent for the Managua daily La Prensa. Bravo had been killed in the previous year upon leaving a voting booth during claims of election irregularities. In 2004, a military court in the Ivory Coast found a police officer guilty of the murder of journalist Jean Hélène, a French correspondent with Radio France Internationale, who was shot in the head outside the national police headquarters while waiting to interview an opposition activist. But such convictions remain rare, especially when they involve local correspondents.

To help illustrate the problem, CPJ developed an Impunity Index. The methodology is simple: The index calculates the number of unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of a nation’s population. The size of the population is used as the base of the calculus since it is a discernible figure, unlike attempts to guess at the number of journalists in any one nation at any given time. Determining who is a journalist has long been problematic. In a digital age, it becomes nearly impossible. The percentage of journalists belonging to a trade union or professional association varies from nation to nation, and local journalists such as community radio reporters often belong to no formal group. Moreover, defining who is a journalist in the blogosphere can be done only on a case-by-case basis. (Most observers would seem to agree that journalists, noted in The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosentiel, as opposed to other disseminators of information, engage in some process of verification.)

The number of unsolved journalist murders is a figure which hits as hard as a bullet, however, in all too many nations. The latest Impunity Index covers the years 2000 through 2009, and includes nations with at least five unsolved journalist murders over the same period. Iraq tops the list with no fewer than 88 journalist murders out of a population of over 31 million, followed by the much smaller nation of Somalia with nine unsolved journalist murders in a nation of nine million people.

Few are surprised to see either nation top the list. But the countries that follow may not be expected. Three democratic nations (nations with a reasonably long history of competitive national elections) come next: the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Colombia. The Philippines has had 55 unsolved journalist murders so far in the past decade out of a population of 90.3 million. The smaller nation of Sri Lanka has seen 10 unsolved journalist murders out of a population of 20 million; Colombia, 13 out of over 44 million.

All the remaining nations on the list are also all at least nominal democracies, although a few if not more for different reasons may not be arguably worthy of even that term: Afghanistan, Nepal, Russia, Mexico, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The ongoing problem of such impunity in murdering journalists cuts across geographic and political boundaries, perhaps the single greatest threat to press freedom worldwide. But it also raises questions that go beyond the traditional bounds of press freedom monitors. One thing, however, is clear: in the post-Cold War era, civilian government institutions, which include judicial and law enforcement capabilities, remain woefully weak in many nations, while military or intelligence agencies continue to dominate many of the same nations.

Who is behind all these journalist murders? The answer is also not what many might expect. Government officials of one kind or another have killed nearly as many journalists as terrorists or other political movements and groups. In fact, if one adds government-backed paramilitary groups to the list, government officials along with their paramilitary allies have murdered more journalists than terrorists and other anti-government groups.

Individual CPJ case capsules — which, along with all other data cited here, are available online—have identified anti-government political groups and movements, including terrorist organizations, as being the most likely perpetrators of at least 30 percent, or 180 cases, out of a worldwide total of 599 murders since 1992. Civilian government officials are considered the probable perpetrators of 24 percent of journalist murders. Military government officials are responsible for another five percent, and pro-government paramilitary groups are responsible for seven percent, or of about 41 murders over the same period.

The repercussions of the murder also stretch beyond the incidents themselves. The murder of any one journalist sends a signal to countless others that they or members of their family could well be next. Many journalists have been threatened, sometimes repeatedly, before being murdered. But countless more journalists have been warned not to travel the same path. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the perpetrators or those who wish to keep the press from reporting on their own wrongdoings, murdering a journalist makes cold-blooded sense. In the 1980s, many journalists were murdered while covering human rights abuses. In the past two decades, more journalists have been killed while reporting on corruption, such as collusion between government actors and organized crime.

Murdering some journalists, while threatening to target even more, generates fear that is hard to measure. Self-censorship has become routine in nations from Colombia to Mexico. After the tortured remains of previously mentioned Mexican reporter Espinosa were discovered, no other reporter in the city of Saltillo attempted to report on why Espinosa had been killed. In fact, his newspaper, Zócolo de Saltillo, went in the other direction entirely and stopped reporting on organized crime, according to a senior editor who asked to remain anonymous.

The unchecked proliferation of journalist murders also challenges some of the precepts behind global press freedom indices produced by groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Freedom House as well as Reporters Without Borders. Based on a multiplicity of factors, their global indices, when evaluating another democratic nation like the Philippines, must somehow weigh the value of a relatively open environment for the press to criticize the government and report on a wide range of other topics against the disvalue of journalist murders.

Multilateral institutions like the World Bank are only beginning to come to grips with this ongoing problem, and how to factor it into decisions concerning loans and other economic support to nations. In fact, while economic and health indicators like gross national product and infant mortality per capita have long been used to determine levels of economic development, another way to measure development would be to examine the rate of prosecutions for murders. Hard, comparative data on the topic is not readily available. But one factor that clearly separates the world’s most developed nations from most other nations is that in most G-8 nations, for example, most murders are solved. In contrast, throughout much of the world, the global rate of impunity for unsolved journalist murders approaches 90 percent and largely appears to be replicated for the murders of other citizens as well.

Danger at the Front Lines

At the same time, combat journalists and other reporters who cover dangerous situations still face great risks. No less than 18 percent of the journalists killed on the job in all circumstances since 1992 died covering combat or some other form of military engagement. Another ten percent were killed during reporting on matters like violent demonstrations.

Among field reporting incidents, disputed shootings have received the most attention. What’s the difference between a murder and a disputed shooting? In a murder, no one doubts that a homicide occurred; the question is who did it. In most disputed shootings, everyone knows who fired the ordinance that killed the journalist; the question is whether the firing was justified.

Few cases have received more scrutiny than the August 2003 shooting of Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana outside the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He was in a car with members of his crew after filming outside the walls of the jail when a US Army tank approached their position in the street. Dana got out of the car, put his camera on his shoulder, and began walking in the direction of the tank as he was filming it. A gunner atop the tank opened fire, hitting Dana fatally in the chest.

The soldier who fired later said that he had seen a dark-skinned, dark-haired man in black clothing, and mistook Dana’s camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, according to a US military investigation of the shooting that was later declassified and released to the public. The US military exonerated the soldiers involved. But the same report also included a recommendation that commanders should review the military’s own rules-of-engagement for potential modifications to try and avoid such incidents in the future. Human Rights Watch and CPJ would later make a similar recommendation in a 2005 letter to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In fact, since 2003, at least 16 journalists have died and others seriously wounded by US forces’ fire in Iraq. US military authorities have conducted investigations in less than a handful of cases, but the investigations exonerated the soldiers involved in each case. It remains unclear whether, or to what degree, the US military may have reviewed its procedures in response to the recommendations by its own investigators and others.

Another well-known disputed shooting involved Israeli Defense Forces and British freelance cameraman and film director James Miller, who was working on a documentary for the TV channel HBO in Gaza in May 2003. Miller and his crew were working out of the home of a Palestinian family as they filmed the army’s demolition of houses in an area that the Israeli army alleged contained tunnels used to smuggle arms. Near midnight, the television crew decided to leave the home and walked toward a fixed position of Israeli troops and armored personnel carriers 300 feet away.

The journalists were wearing jackets and helmets marked “TV,” as was later shown in the HBO documentary. One crewmember waved a white flag, while Miller used a flashlight to illuminate the flag and also shouted a greeting as they approached. A shot was fired. The group yelled that they were British journalists, and a second shot was fired immediately after. The video shows the second shot hitting Miller, who was struck in the neck. Several more shots followed. An Israeli army spokesman first said that troops in the area returned fire after being fired on by rocket-propelled grenades. Later, the army said that Miller was struck by a bullet from behind, claiming that he may have been hit by Palestinian fire. Israeli authorities exonerated the soldiers involved; exhortations by CPJ and others for the Israeli army to conduct a transparent investigation into the shooting were not heeded.

These incidents and others helped compel a group of journalists based in Geneva, Switzerland, who cover the United Nations and other multilateral agencies, to form a group with two goals: to establish a universal press emblem and to work to modify the Geneva conventions, making it an explicit war crime to target journalists. Most global press freedom groups including CPJ, Reporters Without Borders, the International Federation of Journalists, as well as a consortium of groups based in Europe known as the International News Safety Institute opposed the changes.

Global press freedom groups argued, first, that establishing a universal press emblem would require the formation of a regime to determine who would be eligible to don the emblem and that this would be tantamount to establishing a licensing regime which would determine who is and who is not a journalist. Such a step would only feed efforts by repressive regimes, the global press freedom groups went on, which already sought to restrict journalists by licensing them according to political criteria.

Second, it is already a war crime to target civilians, a category which includes journalists (journalists who are embedded with military forces may be legitimately targeted, as they legally become a part of the military unit to which they are embedded). Thus, to make the targeting of journalists an explicit war crime would not only be redundant and unnecessary; it would also send the message to the public that journalists saw themselves as special and somehow more important than other civilians.

Moreover, the entire debate over the changes proposed by the Geneva-based group, now known as Press Emblem Campaign, does not address the facts underscored here that nearly three out of four journalists killed are murdered outright in non-military situations in direct reprisal for their work. But the discussion has managed to generate more dialogue over the issue than ever before, starting largely with the International News Safety Institute and its watershed 2006 report, “Killing the Messenger: Report of the Global Inquiry by the International News Safety Institute into the Protection of Journalists.”

Reporting, Past and Future

Violence, of course, is only one way to silence the press. In many so-called closed or restrictive nations, especially those controlled or dominated by a single political party or monarchy, outright censorship of the press and imprisonment for individual journalists who persist in crossing the line is the most common reprisal. For 11 consecutive years, China was the world’s leading jailer of journalists. But Iran usurped China to hold that dishonor after jailing dozens of journalists in the wake of election unrest in 2009. Cuba is next on the list, followed, unfortunately, by sub-Saharan Africa’s newest nation, Eritrea.

Two trends also stand out. In 2008, online journalists of one form or another surpassed print and broadcast journalists as the largest single category of journalists imprisoned around the world, comprising nearly half of those incarcerated. In the following year, the number of jailed freelance journalists nearly doubled from the previous three years to similarly make up almost half of incarcerated journalists. Both trends are likely to grow: Further digital advances will empower more freelance journalists to venture out on their own, while newsroom cutbacks, especially in newspapers in most developed nations, will lead to more freelancers on the market.

One should also not forget that many methods to restrict the press fall somewhere in between the more obvious means of violence or imprisonment. For instance, ruling party thugs have intimidated and attacked journalists in the streets from Zimbabwe to Venezuela; government officials and other public figures have brought criminal libel suits against journalists from Thailand to Morocco; national agencies have ordered impromptu tax audits against news outlets from the Ukraine to South Korea. In nations such as Hong Kong and Argentina, governments have manipulated private or public advertising to punish media outlets’ critical reporting, as was recently documented by the Center for International Media of the US-funded National Endowment for Democracy.

Serious challenges lie ahead. The Committee to Protect Journalists has launched a Global Campaign Against Impunity, which aspires both to raise awareness among the public in nations like the Philippines about the value of journalism to society, and to pressure law enforcement authorities to bring the murderers of journalists to justice. Some progress has already been made in Latin America to resolve a number of journalist-murder cases, due to efforts by the Inter-American Press Association. There is no doubt, however, that progress will take time.

But the first step toward solving any issue is to acknowledge it. One should also keep in mind that behind every figure is a face, and most likely also a family, friends, and colleagues, all of whom suffer from a journalist’s persecution or death.

Think Daniel Pearl, Atwar Bahjat, or Valentín Valdés Espinosa. Clearly, there is much more to say.

Hollman Morris, Labeled ‘Terrorist,’ Finally Harvard-bound

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Original Story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’  blog.

For a month, U.S. officials in Bogotá told Colombian journalist Hollman Morris that his request for a U.S. visa to study at Harvard as a prestigious Nieman Fellow had been denied on grounds relating to terrorist activities as defined by the U.S. Patriot Act, and that the decision was permanent and that there were no grounds for appeal. It was the first time in the storied history of the Nieman Foundation that a journalist had been prohibited from traveling not by his own nation, such as, say, South Africa’s apartheid regime back in 1960, but by ours, noted Nieman Curator Bob Giles in the Los Angeles Times.

A coalition of groups including the Nieman Foundation, Human Rights Watch, CPJ, the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma (where Morris was also a fellow), the Open Society Institute, the Knight Foundation, the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, the Inter-American Press Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN American Center, the Washington Office on Latin America, and the North American Congress for Latin America rallied to Morris’ defense, publicly and privately imploring U.S. agencies to reverse the decision. Last week, the multilateral Organization of American States also asked the State Department to grant Morris the visa.

Morris wrote this afternoon in an e-mail to the above groups: “I just got out of the U.S. Embassy and they gave me the visa.” He went on: “I am very happy, and I know none of this would have been possible without you.”

CPJ and other groups are happy, too. Although the month-long denial of the visa raises questions that remain unanswered. Such as: Did U.S. officials accept information provided by their Colombian counterparts without independently verifying the claims? Did U.S. officials follow Colombia’s lead by (albeit temporarily) red-baiting one of Colombia’s most respected and critical journalists?

After news of the U.S. visa denial broke in Colombia, more than a few callers on radio and television talks threatened Morris’ life saying the U.S. decision was confirmation of his alleged “terrorist” ties.

This is a charge that has been levied against Morris before, by Colombian officials as high-ranking as President Alvaro Uribe, who has accused Morris of being “an accomplice of terrorism” over his reporting of the Colombia’s leftist guerrillas. But human rights groups suspect that senior Colombian officials have really lashed out at Morris over his reports on rightist paramilitary forces linked to senior Colombian government officials. At the same time, Morris was one of the Colombian journalists who was spied on and had phone calls and e-mails intercepted by Colombia’s Department of Administrative Security under the Uribe administration.

Morris has frequently visited the United States, including in 2007 when he received the Human Rights Defender Award from Human Rights Watch. Morris’ Nieman Fellowship at Harvard starts in the fall.

Global Media Forum Cites Risks of Environmental Reporting

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Original story ran on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ blog.

He’s young, unemployed, and carries himself with the innocence of a man who hasn’t spent much time outside his own village. But Egyptian blogger Tamer Mabrouk is the real deal. Appearing at an international media conference in Bonn, Mabrouk’s description of chemical dumping into a brackish lagoon on the northern Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea was punctuated by photos of unmistakable filth. He won over the audience when, in response to a question on how one travels with sensitive material, Tamer deftly removed a memory card secreted in an electronic device and held it in the air. That, he said, is where he had carried documents for this trip.

The lines between journalism and blogging have never been blurrier, but the risks and challenges of reporting on environmental issues are clear. BP workers and U.S. Coast Guard personnel have denied access to photographers and camera crews trying to document the ongoing oil spill off shore of the U.S. coastline in the Gulf of Mexico. In many other nations, extreme and sometimes violent reprisals have been reported in the wake of stories on environmental degradation.

Before I tell you about the journalists who made it to the June 22 environmental panel at the third annual Global Media Forum, hosted by the German state broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, I’d like to tell you about a few who were unable to travel. Few journalists have done more to document illegal logging and other encroachments on the Brazilian Amazon than Lúcio Flávio Pinto. But, in response to his stories, private companies, government officials, and other actors have filed more than 30 lawsuits against him in courts whose integrity is challenged. The point of the suits is to harass, if not drive him into bankruptcy, says Pinto who turned down the invitation to join the panel in Germany. If he were to leave Brazil for even a few days, he explained, he might fail to respond to a judge’s unexpected ruling and thereby lose a case seeking damages.

Another potential panelist just couldn’t physically travel. Mikhael Beketov was a Russian reporter who criticized the local government’s plans to deforest an area in order to build a highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg. He was later found in a coma lying in the garden of his home, at least a day and a half after assailants broke his skull, smashed his fingers, broken his legs, and left him in the freezing cold. One leg and several fingers were later amputated. Elsewhere, environmental journalists in Guinea and Bulgaria have been threatened; journalist Joey Estriber was abducted by unidentified men in the Philippines, never to be seen again.

But one thing that all the panelists in Bonn made clear is that subtle forms of pressure can also silence environmental reporters. Liu Jiangiang is one of China’s few journalists whose stories have led authorities to suspend if not stop dams and other construction projects with potential environmental consequences. He explained that the unwritten rules about what is and is not permitted in China may change without warning, and that pressure often comes from hidden sources to communicate “don’t do that again.”

Elsewhere in Asia, however, the environment is still seen as a minor concern. Rena Saeed Khan writes the weekly “Earthly Matters” column for Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily. She told a packed room in Bonn that terrorist bombings still make the front page in Pakistani papers, and that climate change or other environmental stories make page two at best–even though, she added, there is sometimes a connection between them. There is a nexus between militants and what Khan called the “timber mafia” in the nation’s northwest tribal areas. She also warned that in South Asia, like on several other continents, stories about competition over dwindling water supplies are looming.

In Haiti, it’s not the water but plastic water bottles that are adding to the country’s growing waste in the wake of the January earthquake, according to relief agency sources. Roosevelt Jean Francois is the leader of a community-minded journalist organization called CECOSIDA that promotes leadership development and training on reporting health, environmental and other matters. He noted that one yet untold effect of the relief efforts is the corruption, especially among local officials, over controlling distribution of foreign aid. Francois also noted that Haitian journalists covering any sensitive matter operate in an environment where reporters enjoy little protection against threats and violent reprisals.

Environmental reporters are more often silenced quietly through economic pressure, noted Jean François Julliard, secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders. The pressure may be so great on traditional journalists, noted Julliard, that bloggers may emerge as the chroniclers doing the best reporting. By then I had already underscored to the audience that RSF, the Paris-based press freedom watchdog, had issued a report on the myriad risks of environmental reporting worldwide.

The case of the young Egyptian blogger, Tamer Mabrouk, illustrated the point. He not only got fined for his online exposés, including documents and photographs of dumping by Trust Chemicals Company into Manzala Lake. He lost his job at the factory, too.

This blog is dedicated to colleague and friend Persephone Miel, a champion of press freedom, kindness, and humor.