When U.S. officials, Republican or Democrat, honor only Latin American journalism that promotes their political agendas in the region, it undermines Washington’s democratic credibility there.
As a journalist, I have no problem with media, like Colombia’s Semana magazine, that ferret out scandals involving Colombia’s leftist president, Gustavo Petro.
But I do have problems with media that show up in Washington D.C., as Semana director Vicky Dávila did last week, to receive awards from U.S. politicians expressly for digging up Petro dirt.
And I have just as many issues with U.S. politicians like Dávila’s gushing hosts, Miami Republican Congress members Maria Elvira Salazar and Carlos Gimenez, who expressly honor only Latin American journalism that muckrakes the side they oppose.
It undermines the cause of journalism in Latin America.
When Dávila accepted her plaque on Capitol Hill, I felt the same queasy sensation that struck me once a year when I was a correspondent in Mexico City — when Mexican journalists gathered at the Los Pinos presidential palace to collect awards … from the Mexican government.
Each year I’d shake my head and mumble: “That ain’t right.”
It at least ain’t right for any journalist who wants to be taken seriously — anywhere, of course, but especially in Latin America, where the line between impartial periodismo and partisan propagandismo was for so long so blurred that many reporters’ business cards may as well have read “press” on one side and “press secretary” on the other.
That’s changed, thankfully, in a big way. From Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego, journalism is much more rigorous and independent. It’s a big reason, sadly, that Latin America today is also the world’s deadliest region for reporters, since many governments, militaries and cartels still can’t tolerate that kind of media scrutiny — and still issue their response to it via bullets instead of bulletins.
It’s also a big part of why last week’s Dávila fête made me and not a few of my colleagues who cover Latin America really uneasy.
Let me repeat: I congratulate Semana for recent probes that helped uncover, for example, the bribes Petro’s son Nicolás allegedly pocketed from Colombian narcos, cash that apparently found its way into Petro’s 2022 presidential campaign. But to then kneel and be knighted in the U.S. Congress by conservative pols whose whole political agenda — whose whole vote engine back in their Miami districts — is built around the demonization of anything even remotely left of center back in Latin America, simply serves to dilute Semana’s journalistic credibility.
Knighting journalism for its political rather than civic dividends also undermines the credibility of Salazar (a former journalist who ought to know better) and Gimenez as Latin America policy stewards.
Noxious double standard
It was hard to watch the Semana ceremony and not recall the scandal the magazine itself was involved in five years ago.
Semana had documented evidence that Colombian soldiers were being ordered to double the number of gang criminals and anti-government militants they killed — whether the killing was justified or not. But, presumably, to protect then-conservative President Iván Duque, Semana sat on the story, which ultimately ended up in the New York Times instead.
The Times, of course, was never called into any GOP congressman’s office to receive a medallion, even though its reporting cast a light on something just as foul, if not more, than Nicolás Petro’s narco-corruption.
Nor, to my knowledge, have Republicans celebrated any Latin American journalists for investigating a conservative leader the way, for example, the newspaper El Faro laid bare the covert deals El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, once made with the same vicious street gangs he’s now famously cracking down on.
The signal that double standard sends to Latin America is toxic — and it would be just as noxious if El Faro were to receive, and accept, decoration from Democrats.
In the Republicans’ case, it tells journalists in the region that the only investigative work they do that matters to the U.S., whose opinion still weighs heavily in the hemisphere, is the stuff that brings down the left.
That simply provokes leftist governments to consider journalism that targets them to be yanqui-sponsored propaganda; and it emboldens right-wing governments to consider journalists who target them to be … fair targets.
All of which helps stunt journalism in Latin America.
Tim Padgett
Tim Padgett is WLRN's Americas editor, covering Latin America, the Caribbean and their key relationship with South Florida.. His work appears under a partnership between WLRN and the Key Biscayne Independent.