ON DECEMBER 17, 1986, a journalist named Guillermo Cano Isaza was assassinated in Bogota, Colombia. As editor of the newspaper, El Espectador, he has run a series of stories exposing the dirty world of illegal drug cartels in his country that has run deep even in politics; gaining influence by corrupting politicians and government officials.
Since then, he has been an icon of courage that Unesco created the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, an award that gives honor to organizations or individuals that contributed to the advancement of press freedom amidst threats and harassment from both governments or other entities like organized crime groups.
The award is given to the recipient every May 3 of the year as a culmination to the World Press Freedom Day (WPFD). The WPFD was created by the United Nations General Assembly, that acknowledges the role of the media or the press, upholding press freedom and expression as indicated under Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
This year, the award was given to Swedish-Eritrean journalist, Dawit Isaak, who was arrested in 2001 by the Eritrean government without due process or trial after covering sensitive issues between the Eritrean president and political reformers. Until now, he is not released from prison and rumors spread that he is already dead.
Going back to Cano, it is interesting that he died because he exposed a critical issue that plagued his country - illegal drugs - and yet here we are in the Philippines sharing almost the same dilemma.
The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines documented a case similar to Cano’s demise. On December 2016, former politician-turned publisher Larry Que of Catanduanes, was shot dead in front of his office after writing a column on his newly-created community newspaper, criticizing the local government’s inaction on the existence of an illegal drugs laboratory.
There were no follow-ups to the case since then, and the task force created by the new Philippine administration has yet to be reminded of their mandate to investigate not only Que’s death but also to the hundreds of media practitioners and journalists killed in line of their duties, since the 1980s.
While the death of journalists and media practitioners are not that much under this new administration (for now), the attacks against the media never ceased in the country simply because other people put malice in every (negative) report related to the war on drugs and the new administration.
Most people believed that the media, as a whole, was poised to “destabilize” the new government. They see the media as protectors of criminals, especially drug lords, and paid by the politicians, and drug cartels, who are not allied by the president, simply because the media was adversarial and reported nothing but to paint the new government in a bad light.
On top of this, are lies that spread throughout the Internet.
Masquerading as a news entity, people often find themselves trapped to these unfounded claims, if not twisted facts. These not only add to the confusion of the public as to the role of the media, but it has bred chaos, blurring truth from the millions of information produced.
But this should not stop the role of the media in general, and journalists in particular. Even though that we have differing views on issues, let us be reminded once again that the differing voices are signs that we still live in a free country. If these voices, and the media stopped being critical and did not do its role to check-and-balance (although some may go overboard), then we should be bothered as our freedoms might be slowly being curtailed.
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Post Script:
Four years later after Cano was murdered, politician Cesar Augusto Gaviria Trujillo of their country’s Liberal Party, won the presidency. And despite under his term, one of the notorious drug lords, Pablo Escobar, was apprehended and killed after escaping prison, the former president made an unsolicited advice to the current Philippine administration that the war on drugs is but a futile attempt.
The former Colombian president’s statement of surrender made it appear that Cano’s death was in vain and that he died for nothing.
(nefluczon@gmail.com)