Paris – Cuba remained in 2005 the Latin American nation where news-gatherers have most to fear from the state, holding onto the dubious distinction of being “the world’s second-largest prison for journalists” after China, according to Reporters Without Borders.
The wave of repression launched by the Castro regime in the spring of 2003 continued last year, as three additional independent reporters joined the ranks of the 21 jailed at the beginning of the crackdown, the Paris-based group says in its annual report.
RSF, as the organization is known, is releasing the document to coincide with Wednesday’s observance of World Press Freedom Day.
“Independent media continue suffering regular harassment by State Security and the National Revolutionary Police,” RSF said of the Caribbean island nation, adding that “when they are not incarcerated, Cuban journalists can choose between parole and exile.”
And though the remaining Latin American nations formally recognize freedom of expression and information, gathering and reporting the news remains a risky occupation, the group said.
Last year, RSF said, Mexico surpassed Colombia in the number of journalists killed, with two slain outright – Dolores Guadalupe and Raul Gibb – and a third, newspaper editor Alfredo Jimenez Mota, missing since April 2005 and presumed dead.
“The scourge of drug trafficking weighs heavily on the freedom of movement and expression of journalists in Mexico,” the report says.
RSF laments that in Colombia, reporters must tread carefully as they address “certain issues as taboo as they are omnipresent, such as corruption, drug trafficking and the exactions of armed groups.”
Journalists covering the Andean nation’s four-decade-old civil war are pressured by leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and other combatants who “try to use the media as propaganda tools,” the organization said.
Eight Colombian reporters were forced to relocate – some fleeing abroad – in the course of 2005, RSF notes, adding that the murder of radio newsman Julio Palacios Sanchez is a reminder that “journalism continues to be a matter of life and death.”
The Paris-based group cites 80 cases of “aggression, threats or intimidation” against Peruvian journalists last year, many of them attributable to officials at various levels.
Concerns are also raised about Venezuela, where President Hugo Chavez’s leftist government enacted a press law RSF describes as “very restrictive in the matter of freedom of expression.”
“Although so far the government has not had to resort to this new repressive arsenal, its mere existence is sufficient to create a climate of self-censorship in the communications media,” RSF says.
EFE
