José Luis Cabezas

It was a cold winter morning more than 15 years ago. As part of my daily routine as a foreign correspondent, I opened my laptop to read the Argentine papers. I was shocked by a headline: my colleague José Luis Cabezas, a photographer for the newsweekly magazine Noticias, had been murdered. His bullet-ridden body was found on January 25, 1997, inside a burned car, handcuffed and charred, on the outskirts of the beach resort of Pinamar.

Gregorio Ríos, sentenced to life in prison in 2000 after being convicted of instigating the 1997 murder of Argentine photographer José Luis Cabezas, was released on parole today. In response, we issued the following statement...

President Néstor Kirchner’s administration continued its practice of funneling government advertising to friendly news outlets and withholding it from critical media. Amid increased tension between Kirchner and the press, authorities were also accused of editorial interference in the abrupt cancellation of two independent shows on state-owned broadcast networks.

By Mathew Hansen

Hundreds of journalists have been killed over 15 years, many on the orders of government officials. Few cases are ever solved. In the Fall/Winter 2006 edition of Dangerous Assignments

The Toll: 1995-2004

Each year in January, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) publishes a list of journalists killed in the line of duty around the world. This list has become the most widely cited press freedom statistic and is often seen as a barometer of the state of global press freedom.

While the correlation between the number of journalists killed and the state of press freedom in a particular country is far from exact--no journalists have been killed in Cuba, for example, and only one has been killed in China during the last decade--the annual list does give some sense of the range of risks that journalists face in reporting the news. To provide a more complete statistical picture, CPJ releases a list of journalists killed during the last decade. The list has been broken down by year, country, and a variety of other categories.

While the economy began to recover in 2003 after the worst socioeconomic crisis in the country's history and the political situation regained stability under a new president, the Argentine press continued to struggle with significant budgetary difficulties.

Argentina's economic collapse not only caused about a dozen media outlets to fold, it has also meant that a society that once prided itself on its consumption of newspapers and magazines was forced to cut back. However, despite a shrinking media market, at least three newsmagazines were launched in 2003.

Despite a catastrophic economic crisis in Argentina during 2002--including the default of US$141 billion in foreign debt, a sharp currency devaluation, and the banking system's collapse--the media remain free to report on matters of national importance.

IN A FRUSTRATING YEAR FOR PRESS FREEDOM in Argentina, a proposed bill that would have eliminated criminal penalties for defamation cases involving public officials foundered after local journalists implicated members of the Senate in a major bribery scandal. Senators who had supported the proposed bill quickly withdrew their support.

The long battle to reform Argentina's onerous press laws began in 1992, when then-president Carlos Menem filed criminal charges against investigative reporter Horacio Verbitsky for desacato, or disrespect. Verbitsky appealed his prosecution to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which ruled in his favor. Under the settlement terms, the Argentine government agreed to repeal its desacato law, which it did in 1993.

During his decade in office, former president Carlos Menem used a flurry of lawsuits to stifle independent reporting in Argentina. His best efforts failed. When Menem stepped down on December 10, he left behind a vital and independent Argentine press.

Journalists, particularly those in the provinces, continue to worry about their physical safety. The May 13 murder of Ricardo Gangeme, publisher and editor of the weekly magazine El Informador Chubutense, in the town of Trelew, in Chubut Province, drove home the point. At year's end, investigators were focusing on the theory that Gangeme was killed because of his reporting on local officials.

For most of the U.S. media, there was only one "South America story" last winter and well into the spring: the four-month stand-off in Lima between the hostage-holding Tupac Amaru guerrillas and the government of Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori. The media's focus on Peru obscured an important story that galvanized public opinion in another major country in the region--the brutal execution-style slaying of a photojournalist in Argentina.