
Two days after being abducted and badly beaten in
Guatemala,
prominent journalist José Rubén Zamora was still in shock. "I can't remember
what happened, but I was drugged and left unconscious in a hospital in the
outskirts of
Guatemala City,"
he told me on Saturday after he was released from the local hospital.
His colleagues at the daily
elPeriodico
and members of the local media were stunned by the news on Thursday. Rumors had spread that morning that
Zamora had been
killed. Claudia Mendez, an editor at the paper, told me that she started
crying.
Zamora, a 1995 recipient of CPJ's
International Press Freedom Award, is considered one of the top investigative
journalists in
Central America by his peers.