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Mozambique: Press Freedom Prize for Campaigning Mexican Journalist
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
4 May 2008
Posted to the web 5 May 2008
Maputo
The General Director Of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Koichiro Matsuura, on Saturday delivered the 2008 Guuillarmo Cano World Press Freedom Prize to campaigning Mexican journalist Lidia Cacho Ribeuiro, at a ceremony held in Maputo.
3 May is World Press Freedom Day, marking the anniversary of the Windhoek Declaration on Promoting an Independent and Pluralist African Media, which was signed in the Namibian capital on 3 May 1991, and later endorsed by the UNESCO General Conference.
UNESCO inaugurated the annual World Press Freedom Prize in 1997, and named it in honour of slain Columbian journalist Guillermo Cano, assassinated at the entrance to the paper he edited. The prize is awarded at a ceremony in a different city every year, and this time Maputo was chosen, in recognition of the media freedom advances made since the end of the Mozambican one party state in 1990.
Of the 11 winners of the prize to date, three of them were unable to attend the prize-giving ceremonies because they were in jail, and one (last year's winner, the Russian Anna Politkovskaya) because she had been murdered. Lidia Cacho was more fortunate - she was in Maputo in person, but during her career she has been beaten, jailed and subject to repeated death threats because of her articles denouncing crime and corruption among the Mexican elite.
A freelance reporter based in Cancun, Cacho has contributed regularly to the daily newspaper "La Voz del Caribe", denouncing organised rings of child prostitution and paedophilia, and other instances of organised crime. She wrote a book, "Demons of Eden", which named prominent politicians involved in child prostitution rackets.
She was arrested for libel, and the Puebla state governor conspired with the racketeers to have her jailed and beaten. When the case came to the Supreme Court, it sided with the child abusers and against Cacho.
Undaunted, in 2006 she took up the case of the unsolved rapes and murders of young women in the city of Ciudad Juarez, a shocking example of the impunity enjoyed by those who abuse women in Mexico. In 2007, Cacho won Amnesty International's Ginetta Sagan Award for Women's and Children's Rights.
Addressing the Maputo ceremony, Cacho declared "When I was tortured and imprisoned for publishing the story of a network of organized crime in child pornography and sex tourism, I was confronted with the enduring question of the meaning of life. Should I keep going?"
"Should I continue to practice journalism in a country controlled by 300 powerful rich men?", she asked. "Was there any point to demanding justice or freedom in a country where nine out of every ten crimes are never solved? Was it worth risking my life for my principles? Of course the answer was yes".
"This award", Cacho said, "may not protect me from death threats or from death itself. But it certainly helps to protect my written work and to enable a broader audience to know and understand the Mexican reality and the impact of the global crimes of trafficking in persons and of child pornography".
She recalled that "when the mechanisms of state repression were used against me, I found myself in the strange position of being seen as a heroine simply for exercising -with some dignity- my right to freedom and justice".
"I stood before the Supreme Court with a heart full of hope that they would defend our constitutional right to tell the truth without being tortured or incarcerated." Cacho continued. "Many thought there was so much hard evidence in this case that there would be no room for corruption. It seemed all of Mexico was hoping for a chance to believe that change was possible. Standing against us was a handful of well dressed lawyers in dark blue suits who defended the politicians I had accused of an unsavory relationship with pedophiles".
"But this handful of men was able to lobby the majority of Supreme Court judges to dismiss my freedom of the press case relating to child pornography and organized crime", she accused. "And so I lost and so did my country. But here I am. I was lucky enough to elude death. I had the opportunity to report my own case, to live inside the story of an orchestrated campaign to protect the marriage between organized crime, businessmen and a corrupted government."
But most important of all, she stressed, was "I had the chance to keep my promises to the little girls who were abused by pedophiles and child pornographers, and who asked me to tell their stories. We journalists tend to believe that the shock provoked by reading such stories cannot fail to unite people of good will. That is one of the reasons we keep going against all odds".
"As journalists we should never become messengers of the powers that be", she urged. "Nor should we surrender to fear and self censorship. We know there is something wrong with a world that favors a war economy instead of education, that favors silence instead of freedom and truth".
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| Copyright © 2008 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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