IAPA PUTS RESULTS OF ITS PROBES INTO JOURNALIST MURDERS IN BRAZIL TO INTER-AMERICAN RIGHTS PANEL

The findings were sent to the IAHRC, a dependency of the Organization of American States, on May 19. The dossier documents the cases of Manoel Leal de Oliveira, murdered on January 14, 1998, and Ronaldo Santana de Araújo, slain on October 9, 1997, both in Bahia, the Brazilian state where most murders of journalists have been committed in the past 10 years.

In both cases, the IAPA stressed the impunity surrounding the murders and negligence on the part of local authorities in conducting their initial investigations. The IAPA carried out its own on-the-spot inquiries through its Rapid Response Unit, which it recently formed to speed up official action on crimes against journalists and to help put the perpetrators behind bars. The IAPA team found the police in each case had bungled their investigations.

In the Leal de Oliveira case, the IAPA said that police had "failed to obtain eye-witness descriptions of the suspects, collect the personal belongings of the victim at the time of his death, get statements from all the witnesses, take into account vital testimony or try to ascertain who had made a telephoned threat to the murdered man shortly before he was killed."

The IAPA found that "the official investigation into the Santana de Araújo murder was similarly flawed." The police "took a long time to arrive at the crime scene and failed to cordon off the area, inquiries went from one jurisdiction to another, bogging the process down, there were contradictions in a statement made by one of the suspects that have yet to be clarified, and important evidence disappeared," the IAPA said.

The IAPA last September submitted to the IAHRC its findings in other cases of murdered journalists - those Jairo Elías Márquez and Gerardo Bedoya in Colombia, both slain in 1997, and the 1995 murders of Aristeu Guida da Silva and Zaqueu de Oliveira in Brazil. In the latter case, the IAHRC has already begun taking up the matter with the Brazilian authorities.

In 1997, the hemisphere free-press organization had made similar submissions to the IAHRC on its findings in five other cases of murdered journalists in Latin America - Colombians Guillermo Cano (killed in 1986) and Carlos Lajud Catalán (1993), Guatemalan Irma Flaquer (1980), and Mexicans Víctor Manuel Oropeza (1991) and Héctor Félix Miranda (1988).

The Commission issued a pronouncement on the Félix Miranda case in 1999, declaring that the Mexican state had been responsible for violating the journalists right to freedom of expression, guaranteed under Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights.

Figures compiled by the IAPA show that 223 journalists have been murdered in the Western Hemisphere in the past 11 years - 13 in the last eight months alone (five in Colombia, three in Mexico, two in Guatemala and one each in Haiti, Paraguay and Uruguay).