27082: Hermantin(News)Haiti, Mexico most perilous for media (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Posted on Wed, Jan. 04, 2006

FREE PRESS
Haiti, Mexico most perilous for media

Reporters Without Borders released their annual report showing countries that 
have jailed or killed numerous journalists.

BY JOE MOZINGO
jmozingo@MiamiHerald.com

Seven journalists were killed in Latin America and the Caribbean last year, 
with Haiti and Mexico being the most dangerous countries for reporters, said an 
annual report released today by the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders.

Cuba meanwhile, has become the ''world's second biggest prison for 
journalists'' with 24 in jail, the group wrote. Only China, with 115 times the 
population of Cuba, imprisons more, with 32.
The war in Iraq accounted for 24 of the 63 journalists killed around the world 
during the year, the report said. That brought the total of journalists killed 
in that nearly three-year-old conflict to 76, more than the number killed 
during two decades of fighting in Vietnam.

In Latin America, the seven killings were down from 2004, as were physical 
attacks in general, but violence was still a major problem in drug trafficking 
areas. In Mexico, drug cartels continued to pose a serious threat to the media. 
Almost all the 16 Mexican journalists killed since 2000 ''were writing about 
highly sensitive issues such as drug-trafficking and police corruption,'' the 
report said.

In Haiti, where journalists hoped the ousting of President Jean-Bertrand 
Aristide in Feb. 2004 would bring more freedom, violence continued to engulf 
society. Radio reporter Laraque Robenson, 24, was killed during a gunfight in 
March, when U.N. peacekeepers moved to dislodge a gang of former soldiers from 
a police station in Petit Goave.

''The fatal shots were alleged to have been fired by peacekeepers,'' the report 
said. The U.N. Mission in Haiti ``carried out an internal investigation but 
never released its findings.''
Jacques Roche, a columnist and editor at Le Matin, was kidnapped on July 10 and 
found dead four days later.