33 years ago, I met José Rubén Zamora, businessman and journalist who founded the newspaper Siglo Veintiuno in Guatemala. I don’t remember if it was a meeting of the Committee to Protect Journalists or some other similar organization that brought together the directors of various Latin American newspapers in this country. What I haven’t forgotten is that we hit it off immediately and not just because the newspapers we founded a few months apart had the same name. We also identified it because the two projects, one in Guatemala and the other in Guadalajara, tried to end the stagnation of the traditional press with reporting and investigative journalism with a new generation of young professionals. Both “centuries” achieved their goal: to ventilate public debate, create new readers and irritate the powerful, even if both ended up losing their names: in 1996, editorial differences with the rest of the shareholders led Zamora to break away and found El Periódico; and for similar reasons, in 1997 we had to do it in Guadalajara and created the newspaper Público.
I never saw him again, although I had heard about him from time to time. Sometimes because some accounts of the new journalism mentioned both projects; in others, because when receiving a prize or distinction, some of us discovered that one or two years previously, one of their own had been there. But in the end, the story ended very differently, unfortunately for Guatemalan journalism.
In 2022, Rubén Zamora was arrested for money laundering, after a transaction of almost $25,000, resulting from the sale of a painting with which the director intended to pay El Periódico’s salaries. The powers that be and the president at the time, Alejandro Giammattei, took the opportunity to respond to the incessant allegations of corruption between officials and oligarchs published by the newspaper. In a flawed trial, Zamora was sentenced to six years in prison, the publication eventually closed, and collaborators and even lawyers in his case were convicted. The revenge didn’t stop there. The journalist’s imprisonment turned into an ordeal, later documented by international human rights organizations: deprivation of sleep and basic services, confinement, deliberate infestation of vermin in his cell. “I had worms crawling up my arms.” The so-called Anti-Terrorism Foundation, made up of politicians, businessmen and military personnel, pressured neighboring judges to charge his wife and children with a crime and thus force the detainee to negotiate the freedom of his loved ones by accepting his guilt, renouncing his journalistic investigations and “confessing” that they were invented. It was not only a matter of putting an end to him professionally, but also of getting rid of the international discredit that the political persecution of the journalist had caused. The family was forced to leave the country to avoid being used against them.
In January last year, the arrival as president of Bernardo Arévalo, of the progressive Semilla movement, favored the situation in Zamora, at least partially. In October of the same year, after a complex legal procedure, the journalist obtained the benefit of “home against prison”, a pleasure that lasted only a few months, since a court overturned this decision in March of this year. However, something has changed. Even if the judicial system is in the hands of the most conservative groups in the country, who have even pushed the new government to the wall thanks to numerous trials, the management of prisons is the responsibility of the Executive. This allowed Zamora to benefit from more bearable conditions. The worst is not the four-year sentence for venting, but the vulnerability in which he finds himself facing courts that are suspicious of these powerful people that El Periódico has demonstrated for so many years.
I remember José Rubén as a cultured man, with easy conversation and a good sense of humor. At a time of repression and censorship in the 90s, he changed the name Siglo Veintiuno to Siglo Fourteen and, ironically, some pages were published in black. The testimonies of those who were able to visit him show that this has not changed. Without any vocation for martyrology, he admits that at one point he collapsed and felt lost, but at least he did not give in to the will of his captors. Celebrate today by knowing again what a watering can and a shampoowalks what he estimates to be 10 kilometers a day in his 2×5 cell and says that when he leaves, he will continue his denunciation against corruption, even if it will be by another means.
This week I was in Guatemala, but more than three decades after we met, I didn’t feel like I had the right to ask for a visit. However, once the prison became present to me, a stone’s throw from my travels, I could not help but think about its fate, about the vulnerability of journalism in the face of power, about the precariousness of destinies subject to the political vagaries of each country. In the fact that the 21st centuries could have ended differently.
The Veracruz terrorist
It remains a mystery in which scenario the prosecutor of a progressive government, like that of Veracruz, can bring a charge of terrorism against a journalist, even in the case of a communicator who covers the so-called red note. This Monday morning, Claudia Sheinbaum expressed her surprise, called on local authorities to re-examine the case and rejected any form of censorship of freedom of expression. Thank God. But beyond correcting such absurd arbitrariness or asking ourselves what is happening in Veracruz, this fact is an alarm signal about the excesses to which the mixture of power and ineptitude can lead. A necessary reflection for a movement charged with so many ideals, but also with so much power.
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