881 journalists have been killed worldwide over the last 10 years, and for only a very small number of them do we know who was responsible. In some countries they are genuine targets. One of these is El Salvador.
"There is no democracy without freedom of the press." This is what the President of the European Parliament David Sassoli wrote on Twitter on 2 November on the occasion of the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists, adding that on a day like that, "we must pay tribute to Daphne Caruana Galizia, Ján Kuciak and all those around the world who lost their lives for doing their job as reporters."
Daphne was a Maltese journalist and blogger, involved in numerous investigations and active against corruption, who was assassinated in a car bombing in 2017, while Ján was a Slovak journalist who was investigating the management of European Union structural funds in his country and was found murdered at home in 2018.
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Over the last 10 years, at least 881 journalists have been killed around the world for telling the truth. In nine cases out of ten, the murders go unpunished. Indeed, almost 90 per cent of those responsible for the killings of the 1,109 journalists murdered between 2006 and 2018 have not been convicted.
These are some of the figures released by Unesco for the #KeepTruthAlive campaign. "If we cannot protect journalists who are targeted, it will be extremely difficult to remain informed and contribute to decision-making. If journalists cannot do their work safely, tomorrow's world will be marked by confusion and disinformation," said the United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres.
Without freedom of expression and a free press, it is indeed impossible to keep democracy alive.
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While the cases of foreign reporters killed, especially in war zones, are those that attract the most attention, in reality, as the Unesco dossier reveals, in 95 per cent of cases it is local journalists who die.
In El Salvador, it is criminal gangs and Narcos that blunt journalists' pencils and silence their voices. With threats, but above all with murders. There were 3,341 homicides by the end of 2018 in El Salvador, an average of 9 people killed per day, placing the country among the most violent in the world.
Drug trafficking remains the main activity of Salvadoran criminal organisations, barely challenged by the security forces. In many cases, members of institutions and journalists have also been caught up in extremely serious acts of violence. The constant attacks on freedom of expression have silenced hundreds of local reporters, forcing many of them to publish anonymously, giving up their names in order to continue reporting. Some media outlets, on the other hand, have stopped covering what is happening altogether.
A violent act against one journalist becomes a message of silence for all the others, who often choose to self-censor. This amounts to a double murder: on the one hand the journalist is killed, and on the other their truth is killed.
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El Salvador is a country of paradoxes that only a handful of journalists attempt to describe. You can buy cocaine and crack by stepping outside, yet the consumption of soft drugs is a criminal offence. Rape is a national emergency, yet women risk thirty years in prison even for a miscarriage. The morgue cannot keep up with the bodies, yet weapons are sold freely in shops.
There, life seems to count for very little — yet it is above all during the most dramatic period in the country's history, the civil war that lasted from 1980 to 1992, that Carlos Rodriguez becomes a journalist. And as such, he finds himself having to describe, on top of all this, the horror of persecutions, even after the first free elections.
Persecutions and threats that have also affected him personally: "I survived three attacks, because of what I was reporting, because of what I was witnessing. In the last attack they shot me and I was seriously injured. My mother then told me: better a son far away than a son dead." And so in 1997, Carlos decides to leave his country and applies for political asylum in Italy, in Rome — asylum that is granted to him.
In 2002 an earthquake strikes El Salvador and all of Central America with devastating force — "an earthquake that destroyed the entire neighbourhood where my mother lived. So after five years of exile I went back to rebuild. Her house and my country."
Carlos soon realises, however, that after the war and after the earthquake the country is focused solely on rebuilding its infrastructure. "We weren't rebuilding life, coexistence. Many families were destroyed, fragmented, and from this situation criminal groups were emerging." Gangs that absorb pain and poverty and discharge violence and bloodshed.
"I set about investigating these groups, documenting the dynamics of the clans, carrying out violence prevention work and neighbourhood projects to give young people something to do in their free time: libraries, sport, art, culture. I intended to fight by every means against organised crime, against the violence that every day took away the best of what we had in our society — young people."
Like a film he has already seen, Carlos begins to receive threats and comes under attack again for wanting to raise awareness in his community through concrete actions and journalism. "For six months I didn't work and I could barely leave the house. It was then that my wife and my four children said: we don't want a dead father."
Carlos looks out of the window of the room where we are talking. I think he is calling those days back to mind, but that is not the case: "I remember every single moment of that night, talking with my children. One and a half, seven, ten, thirteen years old. Dad has to go. It was the first time we had ever been separated."
Carlos weeps as the plane gains altitude. "Leaving the country where you were born is a difficult choice, one that breaks your heart — and leaving your family even more so."
He is once again an exile because of his writing, his reporting, his actions on behalf of his country, and he decides to return to Italy, "the only place where I felt I had an opportunity to protect myself and my family," who have recently joined him.
Carlos Rodriguez is a witness, an exile from the dramatic situation faced by those who want to report the news in El Salvador, who are committed to covering facts and stories. To making their community aware. Because a people without information is a people without history and without memory.
