Abstract
Drug-trafficking routes have changed, with Paraguay now playing an increasing role. As vicious gangs and corrupt officials try to gag reporters,
Paraguay’s sparsely controlled 850-mile border with Brazil has been used for smuggling for decades, but Brazilian drug organisations have increased their operations here in recent years, according to police from both countries. In its last full survey of the region, in 2011, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime considered Paraguay the largest producer of marijuana in South America, accounting for 15 per cent of the world’s harvest.
Paraguay is also turning from a transit country for cocaine trafficking to a producer country, according to its anti-drug agency, the Secretaría Nacional Antidrogas (SENAD), with the installation of laboratories in its territory financed by Brazilian gangs. As has been seen in other countries, the expansion of the drug networks is undermining institutions and leaving a trail of corruption, violent crime, and censorship.
The threat this poses to reporters and freedom of expression has never been clearer in Paraguay, a landlocked country a little bigger than Germany but with only 6.7 million people. Three journalists were killed there in 2014 – a record number. Santiago Ortiz, secretary-general of the Paraguayan Journalists Union (SPP), attributes the spike to the “freedom of action” that mafias enjoy in the country, because he believes they have infiltrated all branches of government. “We have to dismantle the narcostate that Paraguay has transformed into, or we will turn into Mexico,” he told Index on Censorship.
The first death was in May 2014, when radio presenter Fausto Gabriel Alcaraz Garay was executed by two assailants in Pedro Juan Caballero. He worked for Radio Amambay, where he often denounced illegal activities. Senator Robert Acevedo, the radio station’s owner, accused imprisoned drug traffickers of ordering the killing from jail. Radio reporter Edgar Pantaleón Fernández Fleitas was killed a month later in the northern city of Concepción, after returning from hosting his daily radio programme on Radio Belén Comunicaciones, on which he often accused judges, lawyers and prosecutors of corruption.
Journalist Pablo Medina at work in Paraguay’s Mbaracayu Biological Reserve in 2014 before he was murdered later that year
Credit: ABC Color
But it was business as usual after those murders. The police did not make any arrests or name any suspects. Between 1991 and June 2014, 14 journalists had been killed in Paraguay, most of them because of their reports about drug trafficking, said Ortiz. Investigations led to convictions in only one case, according to the union.
Things changed after the third death in October. The victim, Pablo Medina, was a reporter in the town of Curuguaty for ABC Color, a newspaper owned by Aldo Zuccolillo, one of Paraguay’s most influential men.
“The other two reporters were from regional radios. There was a bigger reaction in Pablo Medina’s case, because all the media outlets felt attacked,” said Rufo Medina (no relation), ABC Color’s institutional relations manager.
Pablo Medina was gunned down by two assailants when he was driving home from covering a story. Antonia Almada, one of two sisters travelling with him, was also killed, while her sister survived. President Horacio Cartes, who had not made any public statements after the death of the other two journalists, said Medina’s and Almada’s murders were “an attack against freedom of expression” in Paraguay.
14 journalists have been killed, most because of their reports of drug trafficking
Canindeyú, the province where Curuguaty is located, is one of the county’s main areas for marijuana cultivation. Anti-drug officials roughly estimate Paraguay’s annual production at between 30,000 and 45,000 tons, although they expect to have a more exact figure once they get results from a project that will use satellite images to detect plantations. Eighty per cent of Paraguayan marijuana ends up in Brazil, where its value increases almost fivefold.
Medina did not feel silenced by his brother’s murder. But after his own death, other reporters might
Medina had received numerous threats over his work about illegal logging, drug trafficking and the alleged links between drug organisations and local politicians. According to ABC Color, some of those threats came from Vilmar Acosta, then mayor of Ypejhú (a municipality bordering Brazil), whom Medina had linked to drug-traffickers. The paper said that Acosta told Medina on the phone in 2010 that he would not allow anyone to “smear his name”, and to be careful what wrote. The prosecutor’s office has charged Acosta of ordering Medina’s murder, which was supposedly carried out by Acosta’s brother, Wilson, and their nephew, Flavio. All three are fugitives.
After the murder, the police searched a ranch owned by the Acosta family and found a marijuana-processing facility. They reported that it contained more than three tons of the drug at different stages of production.
In 2011 Vilmar Acosta had also been charged with homicide – along with his father, Vidal Acosta – and placed in pretrial detainee after human remains were found buried in the ranch. However, a tribunal released them less than a month later, and the case is still pending. Medina had alleged that Víctor Núñez, a member of the supreme court, had intervened to protect Acosta, an assertion that Núñez denied. Núñez resigned in December 2014 after the two main Paraguayan parties agreed to open proceedings in parliament for his dismissal.
Acosta’s driver, Arnaldo Cabrera, told prosecutors that Acosta wanted to kill Medina for writing the articles that led to his arrest and for continuing to publish stories that damaged his interests. Medina also accused Acosta of ordering the killing in August 2014 of a political rival, former Ypejhú mayor Julián Núñez Benítez. Prosecutors charged him with that killing as well after Cabrera’s testimony.
Many areas areas of the countryside in Paraguay are controlled by a handful of families, like the Acostas, who own huge tracts of land and have far-reaching influence on political and economic life. Ortiz says local police and prosecutors do not typically pursue investigations if the evidence points to influential figures.
After Medina’s death, ABC Color turned its attention to politicians who had supported Acosta within his party, the Partido Colorado, especially Cristina Villalba, a member of the chamber of deputies. In a remarkable session in November 2014, the Senate made public confidential information from SENAD, which offered evidence of supposed links of three Partido Colorado congressmen and three other politicians to drug trafficking. As a result, congress set up a commission made up of senators and representatives to investigate Medina’s death and the possible infiltration of public institutions by drug organisations.
In the meantime, many journalists still live in fear. Elías Cabral, a correspondent for the newspaper Ultima Hora and the TV station Telefuturo in Curuguaty, asked for police protection in February 2014 after receiving a threat over a story he had done on alleged embezzlement of public works funds at the local level. Cabral got police protection after Medina was murdered. “We do not trust the justice system or the security forces. We feel defenceless,” he said.
Medina was protected by police officers from 2010 to 2013 due to threats, said ABC Color. Police discontinued the service in September of that year because it stopped giving protection to people in the absence of a judicial order, said their chief, Francisco Alvarenga, after the killing.
Thirteen years before Medina’s death, his brother Salvador, also a reporter, met a similar fate and was shot dead for his radio reports on illegal activities in Curuguaty. Milcíades Maylin – one of four suspects – was convicted of his murder and sentenced to 25 years, although nobody was prosecuted for ordering the hit. Medina did not feel silenced by his brother’s murder. But after his own death, other reporters might.
Medina’s death has been a wake-up call for Paraguay on the allegations of links between some politicians and drug traffickers. However, Cándido Figueredo – who remains working in his “prison-like” home-cum-office – laments that the public outrage is fading, while the killers are still at large. He says he won’t quit his job, despite the recent murders and the threats he has received. “I know my life is in danger and that traffickers may end it,” he told Index on Censorship, “but this is what I know how to do and I feel I must continue doing it. If not, my conscience would bother me.”
Black hole for reporting
Mexican journalists and bloggers know the dangers to free speech that come from drug cartels and corruption, writes
Ever since the Mexican government declared war on the nation’s drug cartels in late 2006, the country has consistently been ranked among the world’s most dangerous places for journalists.
According to government statistics, 102 journalists were murdered in Mexico from 2000 until April 2014. At least another eight professional journalists have reportedly been murdered and two more have gone missing since then, bringing the total number of reporters that were killed or disappeared last year to at least 14.
Although drug cartels are believed to be behind most murders, the lines between organised crime and corrupt officials are often blurred. Freedom-of-expression NGO Article 19 noted last year that public officials were allegedly responsible for 60 per cent of the 330 documented acts of aggression against journalists and media outlets in Mexico in 2013.
Some parts of the country have become black holes for reporting, and many Mexicans now rely on anonymous bloggers for local security news. But this also brings great personal risk. In late 2014, the administrator of Valor por Tamaulipas (Bravery for Tamaulipas), a Facebook page with more than 500,000 followers that provides security updates in a northern state, announced his retirement. In October, their colleague María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio was murdered. Her killers published images of her blood-splattered corpse on her Twitter account as a warning to others. Valor por Tamaulipas’ administrator initially stepped back from the project out of fear, but has since resumed work.
Valor por Tamaulipas has continued under new management and many other sites keep on bravely publishing, but there’s little protection from authorities, who are either unwilling or incapable of guaranteeing their safety.
© Duncan Tucker