Media and Government Repression
The repression of journalists and media in Guatemala today is linked to its past in the same way violence is. Additionally, the media tends to portray mainly the negative qualities and dangerous stories about Guatemala rather than explore its culture. However, advances in technology offer both new challenges and advantages to the Guatemalan people. This is why it is vital Guatemalans create spaces of safe resistance for themselves.
Postwar journalism in Guatemala attempts to reach the younger, postwar generation. However, an absence of journalism schools during the war and teaching opportunities presents a great challenge to journalists today, in addition to a lingering fear for personal safety and censorship of the press by the state.
During the civil war, people who spoke the truth about the violence Guatemalans faced from the state did so at great personal risk—they often soon after went missing, received threats, or were killed. A whole generation of journalists and intellectuals essentially went into exile during the war due to this statewide repression. Journalism even after the war regarding the violence was risky. For example, in 1998 Bishop Pondurado, the head of the Catholic Church’s Human Right’s Office, was beaten to death days after releasing a 1400 page report citing the army and its collaborators as responsible for 90% of the war’s brutal crimes. People looking into his case, later on, received death threats and several have since fled the country. One journalist, speaking to a reporter for an article in the New Internationalist magazine about journalism today referred to it as self-censorship, where “Those who speak out against impunity do so in the knowledge that their words could cost them their life.”
In spite of concerns for personal safety, people still continue to speak out against injustice. War politicized the press, turning journalists into political activists truthfully reporting crimes and violence. Biased reporting by the police, concealed evidence of massacres, weak reparations from the law, and the use of propaganda does not stop them. Rather, they are using technology, art, and grassroots movements to remember their past and protect their right to free speech now and forever.