Maria Nilce dos Santos Magalhães, a columnist and editor of the daily Jornal da Cidade in Vitória, in the southeastern Brazilian state of Espírito Santo, was murdered on July 5, 1989. Her case, stalled for many years, was cited by a congressional commission last December as an example of impunity.
The findings of the IAPA investigative unit are posted on its Web site, www.impunidad.com. They reveal complicated networks implicating major local personalities, discrepancies in statements by deponents, death threats to witnesses, detectives and others engaged in official inquiries into the murder, judges linked to a local death squad and the disappearance of the defense attorney of those accused of actually carrying out the murder.
Magalhães was killed as she made her way to a local fitness center where she would work out every morning. At she got out of the car she was traveling in, a man stuck a gun in the back of her head, but it misfired. She ran off and managed to jump on a bus. One the assailants following her also got on the bus and shot her four times. She was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital.
The motives for the murder have been linked to the harshly critical tone of her gossip column that might have aroused the ire of powerful people in Espírito Santo. A recent report by a commission of the Chamber of Deputies that was looking into drug-trafficking identified police officers, politicians and judges allegedly implicated in Magalhães murder. Even so, the crime remain unpunished.
This case, along with other inquiries into murders
in Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Paraguay and Uruguay posted
on the Web site, were investigated by the Rapid Response Unit, set up in January
last year under the sponsorship of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
to carry out on-site probes into the murders of journalists.
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