Montevideo, Uruguay

Andrés Oppenheimer June 14, 2007 Montevideo, Uruguay (English)

Thank you very much. I would like to be as sincere as possible, and as direct and provocative as I can. I do not represent any particular government or administration, and so allow me to be, and excuse me at the same time for being, a little direct in the things that I am going to say. Above all, it is an honor for me to be here talking with you. You all – the spokespersons and residents – are extremely important, and you play an impressive role. According to you, you think that we the journalists hold a lot of power. On the contrary, we the journalists think that you all hold a lot of power, because although you are called spokespersons, you have the ability to operate in both directions. You have the ear of the presidents. Many times when the president is around, you don’t hear us, and you are always on the defensive. When you talk with the presidents, you are viewed as what you are – allies, and people that support them. They have much more confidence in you than in us, and much more credibility is given to you when dealing with sources of power, in the sense that you have influence both above and below you. Therefore, you have the most important aspect of all which is proximity. I can recall one time an advisor to former President Clinton who was working in the White House was talking to me about President Clinton’s foreign policy and I said to him, “Well, but you can go wherever you want, but the State Department will do what it wants.” And he said to me, “You are mistaken. I work in the White House, and the Secretary of State is 14 blocks away,” and he said to me, “proximity is power.” He says, “’When I go to the bathroom and I run into the chief of the cabinet of the President, I can say to him, ‘listen, man, get this procedure that the Brazilian ambassador to the OAS commissioned looked at for me.’ And my counterpart in the State Department has to send a memo that goes to an office that goes to another office, which then goes to another office…” Proximity is power, and you have proximity – much more than we journalists do.

Allow me to look quickly at how to address the situation of the press in our region. But before this I would like to refer to the relationship between us the journalists and you the spokespersons. I read in El País this morning that Secretary General Insulza said that the relationship was quite bad. But I think that it is a great thing that it is bad – it has to be bad, it has to be adversarial. I think that there isn’t such a thing, nor is there even an idea of what such a thing as a good relationship between governmental spokespersons and journalists would look like. What I do think that there has to be, and what there can be, is a civilized relationship, a respectful relationship, and a relationship of compliance with certain norms that predicate gentlemanlike and cordial behavior. For example, on behalf of us journalists, the respect of “off the record.” If a spokesperson requires this, he says one thing to me, and it is my obligation as a journalist to respect that. For fundamental and beneficial reasons to me, if there is no respect, that spokesperson is not going to talk with me and I am not going to get very far. And on the side of the spokesperson, it is a question of fundamental respect, for when the spokesperson will want some important information to reach the general public; it is in his interest to have faith in the journalist, and to take his word, as well as respect it. So I think that without aspiring to have a good relationship, we can at least have a civilized relationship; one based on mutual respect, a respect of the notion of “off the record”, and a mutual granting of access to each other. And herein enters something else in which I believe greatly, which is the human factor. Not only do we journalists sometimes tend to divide everything into ideological terms, but also you all as diplomats probably know much more than we do. The more time that I spend in this business, the more I realize that it is possible to have a good relationship with someone that thinks totally differently than you, so long as you follow the rules of gentlemanlike behavior. I enjoy and cultivate these good relationships with some (albeit unfortunately many fewer than what I would like) members of governments with whom I am in total disagreement, and whom I criticize constantly. But I think that we both win, because as a journalist, by listening to you the spokespersons, I am able to realize things that I wrote or that I am about to write that are essentially bad, and I am able to correct them the next time, or write them in a different way. And I hope that the spokespersons and governmental representatives, the more they talk to me and read what I say, learn things that maybe they are not certain about. From the point of view of you all, if I were in your place, I would always try to sit to talk with the journalists who are the most explicitly critical of the government, because from my stand point as a journalist, it is much easier to attack someone with whom you have never spoken than someone with whom you have sat with, had a coffee, and who gave a certain semblance of good will or of a desire to better the society, or country.

And so I will talk about the issue at hand. I do not think it is any secret that I am extremely worried by the threats to press freedom in the Americas. I think we are witnessing the worst moment for press since the right-wing military dictatorships of the 1970s – and that is coming from a person who had to leave his country in 1976 because of a right-wing military dictatorship. I think that now we are dealing with the most threatening situation for press since that era, and we are seeing it all the way from Alaska to Patagonia. If we go by geographic order starting with the United States, in the U.S. we are seeing some very worrying phenomena – such as a weak press coverage of the War on Iraq. There is also the frivolization of journalism. We are talking about television newscasters in the United States who have transformed the news into frivolous entertainment. The same amount of air time is given to a whale that is trapped in ice in who knows where as is given to 10,000 deaths in a famine in Africa. Thirdly, there is the politicization of the news. This is a current phenomenon that I believe to be extremely dangerous with newscasters for example like Lou Dobbs of CNN. Many of us still desire a clear distinction between two separate brands of news – opinion and news coverage. I am a columnist, I have an opinion, and I write my opinion, but my newspapers says “Andrés Oppenheimer: opinion” in a little box so that the reader knows that this man writes with a slant. However on the first page of the newspaper, and the second page of the paper, the news is in fact the news; they say so-and-so says this, and so-and-so says that, and so the reader himself decides. We make sure to present both sides of the truth, and this is unfortunately what is beginning to change. CNN has the show with Lou Dobbs in which these lines have been completely erased. He is a host in a key time slot on CNN, and he broadcasts what he claims is the news, but what is very clear in this case affects all of us, because he is very anti-Latin American, very anti-immigration, very anti- biocommerce, etc. But it is not presented as opinion; it is presented as the news, following in the path of Fox, which has been so commercially successful. I fear that it is only going to get more and more like this, in addition because the government of the United States—this administration—has been the most arrogant and closed toward the press that I can remember in the thirty years that I have lived in the U.S.

In Latin America, the situation is still even more disturbing, because not only is it attempting to suppress the right of the journalists when dealing with confidential sources, but also that it is putting in doubt freedom of press itself. There are many governments that are attacking the press for being critical or for its right to be controlled by a private business or by a banker. I think we are looking at the same phenomenon characterized by the right-wing dictatorships in the 1990s, but in the opposite way. In that time period, those of us who were writing against the military dictatorship immediately were demonized as communists or agents of the Soviet Empire; in fact they called me this and I could not return to Argentina for 8 years. Now that we are used to criticizing governments that attack newspapers and that close down television stations, we are called “agents of imperialism”, or submissive to yankee imperialism, etc. It worries me greatly, not only the fact that the residents are attacking and gradually intimidating the press, closing television stations or in the explicit case of Venezuela, not approving a license of continuation for the oldest television station in Venezuela (53 years on the air), but rather it worries me even more the silence of the other Latin American countries in reaction to such an attack on press freedom. Legally, one could say that the Venezuelan government has every right to not give out a license – all governments have the right to grant or not grant a license, this is true. But what they do not have the right to do is act based on motives that are purely political simply because a president defines a particular station as this, that or the other. If a president thinks that a station is pro-coup, what follows is a legal process in which the station is accused, and if it results that it is pro-coup and tries to interfere, then the country may take any measures that are deemed necessary. Furthermore, let’s suppose that it does pass through this process, and the government takes back the license, or does not renew it, then it has won another station. This is a clear and straightforward move by the State to nationalize that I think undermines freedom of the press. In conclusion, it pains me the fact that this occurs in Venezuela. I hope that President Chavez can go back and permit greater freedom in the few spaces that remain today. There is one channel left, Logovisión, but it does not have national reach. President Chavez already has said that he wants to close and silence this channel. The president of Ecuador, the president of Bolivia, and the president of Nicaragua all have joined together in solidarity. I repeat that this worries me greatly – the fact that these stations have been closed, taken and made into state-run channels, and the silence of all the Latin American governments to me, as a journalist, is worrisome. Finally, the response that now suddenly comes to us from the ambassador of Venezuela is going to be – why don’t you talk about Guantánamo? Why don’t you talk about the War in Iraq? And I am going to say to the ambassador, Mr. Ambassador of Venezuela, you are completely correct. We should talk about Guantánamo, we should talk about Iraq. I personally think that it is right to challenge the U.S. government for those things that are poorly handled. However, we should not use that as an excuse to justify the violations of freedom of expression and the obligations to human rights in other countries. I think that our job as journalists from the OAS, as a Latin American organization, and from the Latin American press, is to criticize those human rights violations and criticize the violations of freedom of expression, wherever they occur, and to not become a part of the demonization – that so-and-so is an imperialist agent, or so-and-so is a spy from Havana. This does not do anything. Today we are either with press freedom, or without it. And in conclusion, then, with the words of Ambassador Chofi, it would have been difficult to have such an open, frank and respectful dialogue decades ago. The only hope is that we may be able to have it here in a decade from now. Thank you very much.