Murder of Brazilian Journalist Furthers Alarming Trend
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Version 0 of 1. RIO DE JANEIRO — Gleydson Carvalho’s radio program was on the air in the provincial beach city of Camocim when two gunmen burst into his studio. During a musical interval, they subdued the receptionist and told a technician to stay quiet. Then they did their work, unloading three rounds and killing Mr. Carvalho, a journalist known for crusading against political corruption. The shooting of Mr. Carvalho on Thursday sent shock waves through Ceará, a state in northeastern Brazil, while raising alarm among human rights groups as part of a spike in execution-style killings of journalists outside major urban centers around the country. “It all happened very fast,” Ricardo Farias, a technician at the radio station who witnessed the killing, said in televised comments in Ceará. “He received threats that they were going to kill him, and he would say on the air that he was threatened but unafraid of anyone,” Mr. Farias added. “I always said he shouldn’t act like that.” At least three other journalists have been killed in Brazil this year in retaliation for their work, bringing the number of such cases before the killing of Mr. Carvalho to 16 since 2011, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a news media advocacy group in New York. The circumstances surrounding six other cases remain unclear. Many of the killings have taken place in provincial towns or cities; they have attracted relatively little attention in large urban centers like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Some of the most recent cases were marked by extreme brutality. In May, for instance, Evany José Metzker, a political blogger in the state of Minas Gerais who had been investigating a child prostitution ring, was found decapitated outside the town of Padre Paraíso. Less than a week later, a radio journalist, Djalma Santos da Conceição, was tortured and killed in the northeastern state of Bahia. The police in the town of Conceição da Feira found Mr. Santos da Conceição’s body with his tongue cut off and his right eye gouged out. Mr. Santos da Conceição had reported on corruption and crime in the town. “Brazil’s government urgently needs to do more to combat this spike in reprisal killings,” said Carlos Lauría, senior Americas program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists. Mr. Lauría emphasized that proposed legislation that would allow such crimes to fall under federal jurisdiction, in the hope of making them easier to solve, had recently been stalled. Mr. Lauría said that 65 percent of the journalists murdered in Brazil since 2011 had been reporting on corruption and that government officials were suspected to be the perpetrators in 52 percent of the cases, according to research by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Police authorities in Ceará said Friday that they had arrested two suspects in Camocim in connection with the killing of Mr. Carvalho, but that the gunman who had carried out the slaying remained at large. The police did not disclose other leads or information regarding potential motives in the killing. |