Covering Societies Under Threat

By Sandra Larriva Henaine '08, Mexico

Two days before this year's Maria Moors Cabot Prize winners received their medals, they met with students of the School of Journalism for a "Conversation with the 2008 Cabot Medalists: Covering Societies Under Threat."

Co-hosted by the Institute of Latin American Studies at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, the panel discussion focused on obstacles to press coverage in Mexico and Argentina and the exploitation of Latin American workers to support the U.S. consumer economy.

It was the first event of "Scared Silent: Mexico's Journalists Under Attack By Drug Mafias," a Knight Foundation-Cabot Prizes conference held at the Journalism School to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Cabot Prizes, the oldest international journalism prizes in the Americas.

Twenty-one journalists have been killed in Mexico since 2001, making it one of the most dangerous places for journalists, according to a June 2008 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based non-profit organization.

This is the atmosphere in which Cabot 2008 medalist Carmen Aristegui Flores works. An anchor for CNN en Español and the newspaper Reforma, Mexico City-based Aristegui said that Mexican authorities were neither investigating nor prosecuting expanding violence by drug gangs, “a wave of violence that results in approximately 3,700 executions so far this year” and often frightens the press into silence. Nor is the violent drug story “covered by the U.S. press even if both countries are responsible for the growth of this phenomenon," she said.

A free press in Mexico is also inhibited by the duopoly of the Mexican broadcast media ownership. Mexico's two main networks own 94% of the TV frequencies in the country, said Aristegui. "We all know that a democracy does not tolerate such concentration levels."

Aristegui sees this as a serious danger to Mexico's young and fragile democracy. "Television no longer looks to influence the elections, but to determine them," she said.

The 2008 Cabot medalist Gustavo Sierra, international news editor and war correspondent for the Buenos Aires-based newspaper Clarin, decried the closed door that conceals abuse of official power in his country. President Nestor Kirchner and his wife and successor, Cristina, the current president, have held only one press conference in the eight years they have ruled, said Sierra, complaining of a climate of official secrecy.

This closed door to press scrutiny has remained "almost the same" throughout his 30-year career as an Argentine journalist, Sierra said.

Exploitation of Latin American workers is supporting the American way of life, said Michael Smith, an American journalist based in Santiago, Chile, for Bloomberg Markets. He has spent years looking into the exploitation of the poor in Latin America, who often work many hours for very little—a condition he describes as virtual slavery. He looked at underpaid workers extracting raw materials in Brazil and serving as guinea pigs for untested drugs in Miami. This huge, marginalized segment of the population has zero or little access to basic services, a "very fragile prosperity" and not the "myth that Wall Street was selling," he said.

"Things are cheap (in the U.S.) because people (in Latin America )are not getting paid enough."

The same exploitive realationship applies to Mexican immigrants to the U.S. , said 2008 Cabot medalist Sam Quinones, who covered Mexican immigration and its relationship with the U.S. for ten years as a freelancer before recently joining the Los Angeles Times as a reporter. "So much about Mexican immigration has to do with our own economy today," he said. While the U.S. provides an escape for Mexico's poor, their growing presence as a working class in this country is leading Americans to become "aristocratic in a sense."

He thinks the current financial crisis may bring sanity to the immigration issue, where Americans are forced to take over the jobs they once chose to have immigrants perform. "A lot of what we use immigrants for is to maintain this fiction of how life should be," he said. In the case of a long-lasting recession, many Mexican immigrants might go back home, pressuring the government into improving their quality of life. This, said Quinones, could be "the healthiest thing for both countries. Maybe our kids start getting jobs again."