The news of the tragedy changed Marcos Casas' life. On January 26, 1983, eight journalists were massacred by villagers in the harsh, unforgiving mountains of Uchuraccay, Peru. The journalists from Lima and Ayacucho had ventured there to document reports of campesinos taking up arms to resist the violence and terror of Maoist extremists known as Sendero Luminoso - or the Shining Path. But the news reporters' quest for information, their mere desire to tell the stories of the people, led to their deaths.

Forty campesinos, confusing journalists armed only with cameras and notebooks for Sendero intruders, never gave them a chance to present themselves or ask a question. They attacked the reporters with rocks, shovels and hatchets, beating and stoning them to death.
Casas, then a young man from the Andean provincial capital of Cusco, joined shocked citizens across Peru in grieving for the slain journalists, Eduardo de la Piniella, Pedro Sánchez and Félix Gavilán of El Diario de Marka, Jorge Luis Mendívil and Willy Retto of El Observador, Jorge Sedano of La República, Octavio Infante of Noticias de Ayacucho and Amador García of Oiga magazine. They were hailed as martyrs who died in search of the truth.

"The killings impacted me personally,'' said Casas, who had just been released from the Peruvian army and was thinking about studying engineering. "And it became my dream to become a journalist, to become a voice for those who didn't have a voice.''
So Casas took a job as a radio reporter in Cusco. He set out into the streets with a tape recorder, looking for real life stories to broadcast on radio - by far the most effective medium for reaching the underclass in a nation where 12 million people, half the population, live in poverty. "I would ask people, 'How are things?''' Casas said. "There was a lack of food. Inflation was at 2,000 percent. And there was violence from Sendero.''
Over the next two decades, Casas worked in radio and television and as a newspaper reporter, seeking to present the human face of a nation in fear and crisis. But the years and pressures of the job wore him down. Something happened to his journalistic passions. He became disillusioned with his profession. For many journalists from the provinces to Lima, such a change in attitude probably wouldn't have been surprising.
The administration of President Alberto Fujimori was working ruthlessly to control the media and govern the flow of information in Peru. Fujimori's intelligence services director, Vladimiro Montesinos, was furtively paying millions of dollars in bribes to television executives and bankrolling a sensationistic Chicha tabloid press for adoring coverage of Fujimori and blistering attacks on his opponents. Enterprising independent journalists were being harassed and threatened.

Montesinos once bragged that he had the press on a string and directed media coverage like a puppeteer. "We're together, all lined up,'' he boasted to military generals in Lima, describing his relationship with the owners of Peru's major television stations in November, 1999. "Every day I have a meeting at 12:30 with them. At 12:30, we plan what will be on the news that night."

In the Peruvian provinces, where the working conditions and pay for journalists were woeful, more casual forms of corruption were common. Casas discovered that reports critical of the local government or certain industries seldom saw the light of day. He said he came to believe that some media bosses were in the comfortable embrace - and pay - of political figures. He also suspected that some journalists doing "investigations" only did so to shake down subjects for money or other personal benefits before abandoning their stories.
"In Peru, freedom of the press doesn't exist,'' Casas cynically concluded earlier this year. "All the media submit to the political and economic powers. And journalists are instruments of those powers."

Last year, Casas officially became such an instrument. He took a job as spokesman and image consultant for the mayor of Cusco, Carlos Valencia. Meanwhile, Casas also kept his job as a news reporter at El Diario del Cusco and its partner television and radio stations. Noting the obvious conflict of interest, he insists he doesn't report on anything to do with the mayor. But he concedes he also protects information on inside dealings of the municipal government from his journalism colleagues.

"The question is, 'Can I be a good journalist if I am part of the government?''' Casas asks.
As journalists such as Casas grapple over conflicts of interests in the provinces and the media power center of Lima rebounds after the shameful scandals of Vladimiro Montesinos, readers and viewers of the media are left with many difficult questions. Can they now trust that what they read or hear is accurate? Are they able to know the difference between courageous, independent news reporting or willful manipulation of the news media and the public?

And yet an era of scandal - spectacularly revealed in an archive of secret videotapes of Montesinos bribing media bosses and boasting of managing the press - presents the journalism community in Peru with a golden opportunity. The revelations can inspire journalists to establish new practices and a lasting tradition of independence and credibility. Time will tell whether the Peruvian news media again becomes an instrument of the powers. Time will tell whether the media seizes the unprecedented moment and honors the memory of the slain journalists in Uchuraccay by pursuing the truth and providing information the public can trust.

Alberto Cendra Astiz, general manager for new business for Lima's El Comercio newspaper and former manager for Canal N television, says journalists and media owners in Peru must both rid their industry of corruption and resist any government efforts to intimidate and control the news business.
"Right now, everybody is trying to clean their image, including people who were involved in the corruption," Cendra Astiz said. "Other people are saying, 'We were blind to it. But in this country, it could happen again. Absolutely yes.''
Ex-spy chief Montesinos is now in prison and ex-president Fujimori is in exile in Japan. But threats and harassment of independent journalists continue.
Recently, Congressman Jorge Mufarech, a member of President Alejandro Toledo's Peru Posible party, proposed a law to imprison journalists for up to eight years for intercepting telephone calls or publishing or broadcasting illegally obtained tapes. The Toledo administration became embroiled in a bugging scandal after television journalist Cesar Hildebrant aired a tape of Toledo expressing concerns in a telephone conversation with an advisor over how he would be greeted in the city of Arequipa. But Mufarech's suggested punishment is chilling.
One wonders what the impact might have been for journalism, freedom of expression and the principle of open government in the United States had journalists been imprisoned for publishing the secret Pentagon Papers, which revealed the quagmire of the Vietnam War, or the White House tapes of President Richard Nixon, which revealed the official cover-up in the Watergate political scandal.
Efforts to intimidate the news media in Peru are persistent. After El Comercio published an exceptionally well documented story alleging Mufarech under-reported the value of an automobile he had imported from Chile, the Congressman filed a defamation suit seeking an incredible sum: $50 million. Most recently, the television program, "La Ventana Indiscreta'' of Frecuencia Latina accused government intelligence agents of investigating its news reporters, following them and tracing their telephone calls. The program identified two sources in the National Intelligence Commission to back up its claim. Alfonso Panizo, the intelligence commission director, said his agency was investigating leaks of classified material. He denied attempting to persecute or intimidate journalists.

The Montesinos scandals have unleashed a surge of investigative reporting in Peru. But many news investigations remain centered on exposing the former regime. Meanwhile, many journalists have been loathe to question the official claims of new Toledo administration.
For example, most of the Peruvian media accepted as fact Toledo's ebullient statements last June that the Peruvian military bravely and efficiently freed 71 hostages and that no negotiations occurred and no ransom was paid after Sendero Luminoso forces kidnapped the oil pipeline workers of an Argentine company, Techint. Only later did Caretas magazine and the Correo newspaper investigate, publishing transcripts of secret radio communications that revealed extensive negotiations to free the hostages. A U.S. magazine, Newsweek, reported that Technict paid $900,000 for their release.

Another challenge for a vibrant, independent media in Peru is for journalists to reconnect with basic reporting and story-telling skills. They must report and write more about the lives, challenges and aspirations of average citizens instead of merely rubbing elbows with the political class.
When Toledo declared a state of emergency and his government teetered on collapse earlier this year, reporters instinctively hovered around Congress and the presidential palace, focused on the politicians. Yet with teachers on strike, thousands of public school students stranded and demonstrations flaring in the capital and countryside, journalists rarely ventured into streets and communities to speak with the Peruvian people. When soldiers opened fire on demonstrators in Puno, killing one student and wounding several others, there was little news on the victims and little investigation of the incident. A press that ignores the people, and the human element of the news, will have a harder time connecting with its public.
In the wake of the Montesinos scandals, some Peruvians such as Carolina Cáceres Pérez, a Spanish school administrator in Cusco, say they are unable to believe what they read or hear in the media. Cáceres said she suspects the press will go along with the official line no matter who is in power, depriving average Peruvians of knowing for sure what is happening.

Cáceres still has anxious memories of the Sendero Luminoso reign of terror in the 1980s and early 1990s when bombings, assassinations and mass killings by Sendero - and retaliatory repression by the Peruvian military -- claimed over 69,000 lives. Cáceres worries about a resurgence of the Shining Path or other militant groups aligned with drug traffickers. From the news media, she wants information and independent analysis she can trust. She wants to be able to believe what she reads.

"If something was happening, the newspapers wouldn't tell us,'' Cáceres insists. "The government wouldn't permit it.''
Yet Peru is now poised to have a healthy discussion over improving the quality and independence of its news coverage, thanks to the courageous work of many journalists who braved an era of repression and media manipulation by the Fujimori government.
In 2000, in a key turning point, El Comercio broke a story that documented how party activists had gathered at a Lima residence and systematically fasified thousands of signatures on petitions to allow Fujimori to seek a third term in office. The newspaper aggressively pursued the story, even publishing a full-page informational graphic that provided a detailed floor map of the Lima house, including multiple work stations that served as processing areas where party activists committed the forgeries.

The Fujimori government had long bullied El Comercio and other newspapers it couldn't control, demanding stiff fines for crimes against the state after negative coverage. Fujimori and Montesinos also exploited a tabloid press they had secretly bankrolled to attack legitimate journalists. "El Comercio is a Cave of Red Communists,'' screamed the headline in El Chino, a pro-Fujimori tabloid. Gente, a popular general interest magazine in Fujimori's secretive payroll, published an article ominously suggesting that "certain journalists must disappear,'' said Cendra Astiz, the El Comercio and former Canal N executive.

At one point, Cendra Astiz was charged with crimes against the state and threatened with a $150,000 personal fine for news coverage critical of the government. He was brought before a judge in Lima. "When I got to the court, they already had all my bank account numbers,'' he said. The charges were later dismissed after the Montesinos scandal broke and the Fujimori government fell.
That happened after one of the media outlets the government failed to control - independent cable television Canal N - interrupted its afternoon programming. It was November, 2000, two months after Fujimori had won a third five-year term in a disputed election. Soon after a secretly recorded video was broadcast on Canal N, Fujimori would tumble from power and Peru's jolted institutions would likely never be the same.
The tape leaked to the station by a member of Congress showed Montesinos paying $15,000 in a thick stack of bills to opposition congressman Alberto Kouri - an ardent critic of the Fujimori government - in exchange for Kouri agreeing to switch parties and vote with Fujimori.
"It was an instantaneous earthquake, an emotional moment in the history of Peru,'' said Luis Jocamowitz, author of the Montesinos biography, Vladimiro, Life and Times of a Corruptor. "…People said, 'This can't happen! This can't be tolerated!''
The videos, and ensuing investigations, revealed how Montesinos and top military officers reaped millions of dollars in illicit profits from weapons purchases, drug trafficking, blackmail and manipulation of the judicial system. Authorities in Peru and elsewhere would discover that more than $140 million had been raided from the national treasury, including $77.5 million stashed in Swiss bank accounts of Montesinos.
But the white hot news revelations of the biggest political corruption scandal in Peruvian history also scorched the reputation and credibility of much of the news media in Peru.
In many of the videos, Montesinos is seen either boasting of his control of news coverage or outright handing stacks of cash to media bosses. In one February, 1999 video, Montesinos is gathered in a living room with Francisco Crousillat López Torres and José Francisco Crousillat Carreño, the father-son owners of Amerca Television, Peru's leading commercial network. Piled on the table in front of them is a stash of bills - advance payments for favorable news coverage of the Fujimori regime.
In another video, Argentine businessman Ernest Shutz, recruited by Montesinos to buy into Peru's Panamerican Television, is seen haggling with the spy chief for $12 million to assume control of the network and deliver bountiful positive publicity for Fujimori. Still another shows Montesinos paying monthly installments to Shutz, counting out hundreds of thousands of dollars.
"There has been problems before of the government attempting to influence the media,'' Jochamowitz said. "But until the 1990s, there had never been a case so organized, so systematic.''
Not only did Montesinos buy positive press for the Fujimori regime, he got media executives to censure reports and fire some of Peru's leading opposition journalists. In a concession to Montesinos, television boss Genero Delgado Parker forced out investigative reporter César Hilderbrant. In 1997, after Frecuencia Latina aired investigative reports alleging corruption by Montesinos and acts of torture and murder by the Peruvian intelligence service, multiple branches of the government went after the station.
Immigration officials stripped Frecuencia Latina owner Baruch Ivcher Bronstein - an immigrant from Israel - of his Peruvian citizenship and forced him into exile. A Peruvian court decision put in power a group of minority stockholders, who remolded the news station into a propaganda arm of the Fujimori regime. But journalists protested the government action to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The court ruled in favor of Ivcher Bronstein. It concluded that the Peruvian government wrongly restricted journalists' right to air news, ideas and opinions and thus deprived all Peruvians of democratic freedoms.
In 2001, the Miami-based Inter American Press Association awarded its "Grand Prize for Press Freedom'' to the El Comercio and La República newspapers, the La Industria newspaper in Trujillo and Caretas magazine "for their outstanding battle with the Fujimori regime for freedom of press in their country.'' A team of El Comercio reporters, headed by Julia María Urrunaga, won an additional first place award for in-depth reporting for its coverage of the reporting scandal.

"I do feel value as a journalist,'' said Urrunaga, now working with the Insitute of Press and Society in Lima. "At times, I feel that our profession is almost heroic. But after Fujimori fell, a lot of people (Fujimori supporters) would come up to me and say, 'It's all your fault.' They'd say, 'Don't you know that all governments steal and cheat?'''
Cendra Astiz heard the same, or worse. "A big part of society was against that we were doing,'' he said. "But we come from journalism. We very strongly defended the responsibility we have as communicators.''
As the Fujimori government fell, media bosses who received millions of dollars from Montesinos were either jailed or fled the country. A vast shake-up has since occurred in the ownership of Peruvian television networks. But the lessons remain uncertain.
Jochamowitz said it is unclear if revelations of media corruption will have any lasting affect on the practices of Peruvian journalists. But he said the Montesinos' scandal revealed many media owners had no background in journalism and made business decisions that flew in the face of proper journalism ethics and the notion of an independent press. He said it is crucial that news reporters and operate freely from the direct line of command of media owners and independently of their business associations.

"After Fujimori resigned, I'm not sure if the press suffered a crisis of credibility,'' said Jochamowitz. "The television stations all changed ownership. There wasn't any chance for any great self-criticism. And the printed press has much less of a sense of guilt, and much less introspection.''
Now may be the time. In May, a group of 25 Peruvian newspaper, television and radio journalists gathered for a three-day conference -- Freedom of Expression: New Resources - that was hosted by the International Center for Journalists in Lima. Their challenge was to develop ideas for providing sustained news coverage of freedom of the press and freedom of expression in Peru. The journalists developed ideas for news stories on censorship, media licensing, journalistic ethics and the relationship between the press and powerful in Peru. They suggested investigations examining the credibility of the news both before and after the wanton media manipulation of Vladimiro Montesinos.
There is little established tradition in Peru of journalists reporting on the news media and freedom of expression. Yet when Congressman Mufarech demands $50 million in an attempt to punish El Comercio for a story that is well documented, his actions should be aggressively reported and analyzed by other Peruvian media.

Recently, Lima news organizations provided spirited news coverage of a showdown at Panamericana television when paint and fists flew in floor-to-floor altercations as two competing ownership groups battled for control of the Channel 5 headquarters. But there was little mention of the history of the protagonists, Genero Parker, who previously forced out Cesar Hildebrant at the behest of Montesinos and Grupo Ernesto Shutz, which previously took millions of dollars in alleged payoffs from the spymaster. The public was also entitled to know more about the future aims of the ownership groups - and how the outcome of the struggle could affect the quality of news reporting and future of independent journalism in Peru.
In the wake of the Montesinos era, Peruvian journalists have new rights and powers. The Inter-American Press Association has hailed the enactment of a public access regulation - the 2001 Law on Transparency and Access to Public Information - as a breakthrough in free speech legislation. But Peru's Institute of Press and Society (IPYS), which pushed for the law to allow journalists and the public to request and receive numerous local, state and federal government documents, says many government officials show little awareness or respect for the law. IPYS lawyer Javier Casas said journalists have been slow to embrace the opportunity to request public documents, report the details and hold officials accountable if they refuse to furnish the information.

Demanding government documents is only one of many tools the media can use to connect with citizens serve and serve the public. Reporting the stories, and life circumstance, of the people is another. Maintaining independence and not selling out to the system is another. Just as Cusco's Marcos Casas was inspired by the sacrifice of the reporters who died in Uchuraccay long ago, journalists should remember the passions that drew them into their profession. But they should not surrender to cynicism.

Peru deserves a robust, independent news media free of corruption, manipulation or intimidation by the government or anyone else. Truth, accuracy and the memory of the slain journalists -- Eduardo de la Piniella, Pedro Sánchez , Félix Gavilán, Jorge Luis Mendívil, Willy Retto, Jorge Sedano, Octavio Infante and Amador García - demand it.

Peter Hetch

Becario de la Fundación Knight en la UPC y reportero del diario californiano The Sacramento Bee. Ha sido colaborador de varios diarios de América Latina y ha cubierto temas como la guerra civil en El Salvador y la invasión estadounidense en Panamá. Es profesor de Periodismo de Investigación en Prensa en la UPC. 

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