• Interview with Mr. Chamorro (from the Langara Journalism Review, 1999)
• The website for Confidencial, Mr. Chamorro' weekly newsmagazine (in Spanish)

Journalist Fights for Press Freedom in Central America
Claudine LoMonaco, Graduate School of Journalism

As a young man in the 1970's, Carlos Chamorro did not set out to be a journalist. He wanted to be an economist, something out from under the looming shadow of his father, Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, acclaimed editor of the Nicaraguan newspaper La Prensa. One of the few independent papers in Central America, La Prensa openly criticized the brutal Samoza dictatorship that had ruled the country for nearly 50 years.

But in 1978, the Nicaraguan National Guard gunned down Chamorro's father. The assassination changed the course of Nicaragua history by strengthening popular opposition to the dictatorship.

It also changed the course Chamorro's life.

He went to work for La Prensa soon after his father's death.

"I came to journalism under tragic circumstances," Chamorro said, adding that his motivations were more political than journalistic. "I got involved because I thought I could help push the country in the direction I thought was necessary."

Carlos Chamorro

At the same time, he joined the Frente Sandinista, the guerrilla army that eventually brought down the Samoza regime. "I led a double life as a journalist and a semi-clandestine militant," he said at the presentation of his most recent documentary film on May 8 in an event co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies and the UCB Graduate School of Journalism. "When the Revolution triumphed, I stayed in journalism."

In 1980, he became editor-in-chief of the Sandinista newspaper La Barricada, where he stayed until being controversially ousted in 1994.

After nearly a quarter of a century of work, Chamorro, like his father before him, is one of the most respected journalists in Central America. He is currently editor of Confidencial, a Nicaraguan weekly, and is the host and director of Esta Semana, a Sunday night television news magazine.

His latest project has been the film Power and Media in Central America, which is the third in a series that explores the history of the media in Latin America, and is funded by The Freedom Forum. (The first two documentaries focused on Mexico and Peru.) The film documents both the role the media played and the radical transformations it underwent during the last three decades in Central America, a period rocked by military dictatorships, civil wars, U.S. intervention, and the tumultuous transition towards democracy.

The film consists of a series of interviews with prominent Central American journalists, including Chamorro's own mother Violetta, the former Nicaraguan president and publisher of La Prensa in its right wing, post-revolutionary incarnation. While the film covers all of Central America, it focuses on Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

The opening sequence shows the grisly assassination of Chamorro's father on a street in Managua. It goes on to tell the harrowing story of how the press survived both censorship and physical repression during the military regimes of the 1970's and 1980's, but not without sacrifice. Government forces bombed radio stations, destroyed press offices, and kidnapped, persecuted and assassinated journalists. In El Salvador, 30 were killed, in Guatemala, 60.

The film also examines the Central American transition to democracy during the 1990's. Far from merely documenting the transition, it shows how the media actively participated in it. In El Salvador, for example, the clandestine Radio Venceremos presented the viewpoint of the guerrilla and helped established the FMLN as a legitimate political player that had to be taken into account. No longer could the rebel fighters be discounted as, in the words of the official press, "squadrons of murderous terrorists." Radio Venceremos later paved the way for peace talks that would end the civil war.

The 1990's also saw the media move away from being organs of political parties and towards more pluralistic, critical forums for news and analysis. No one story highlights this transition more than that of the Sandinista paper La Barricada.

During the Contra war, "newspapers turned into battlegrounds," said Chamorro. "They were instruments of war for one side or another." That meant that La Barricada often hid or downplayed news that was critical of the Sandinista government.

In 1991, after the Sandinistas lost the presidency to the conservative National Opposition Union Party (UNO), Chamorro convinced Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega that in order to survive, the paper needed to distance itself from party. "Journalism had to be committed first to the public and the truth and not with our ideological cause," Chamorro explained.

The paper continued with a Sandinista perspective, but from a more critical vantage point, and grew in public acclaim. By 1994, however, Sandinista leadership clamped down on the experiment.

"They didn't want us to publish news that affected the party," he said. "The argument was that you had to behave like the right-wing papers that treated us like enemies."

The party fired Chamorro. In protest, the remaining reporters went on strike. Three weeks later, 90 percent of them were fired or forced to resign. The paper returned to highly partisan journalism and within four years went out of business.

The documentary ends by looking at the economic and legal challenges facing Central American journalists today. They have no equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act, a crucial tool in investigating government corruption. Furthermore, they have little legal protections against being sued for libel. A recent one million dollar settlement handed down against a political cartoonist in Panama has had chilling effect other journalists.

Economically, media monopolies, such as in Guatemala, where the same individual owns all fours TV channels, threaten plurality.

Moreover, governments are still major advertisers and withhold those dollars as punishment for critical news reports. It is a pressure Chamorro has experienced first hand. In spite of having the top ranked Sunday night TV show in Nicaragua, the government refuses to advertise with him.

Similarly, media outlets censor themselves for fear of antagonizing leading private sector advertisers. When the government gave Pellas, the largest business group in Nicaragua and a major advertiser, an illegal $3 million dollar tax break, Chamorro's weekly Confidencial was the only news outlet to cover it.