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19 El periodismo es el mejor oficio del mundo” (“Journalism is the greatest trade in the world”) read the banner at the top of the website of the Asociación de Periodistas de El Salvador (APES) in 2010. This phrase is borrowed, appropriately , from journalist and novelist Gabriel García Márquez’s 1996 address to the assembly of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA).1 In his address García Márquez notes several deep transformations of the media landscape that have influenced his beloved oficio as he has known it for decades. Chief among them is the emergence of journalism schools throughout Latin America and the profession’s increasing reliance on technology— particularly recording devices, which García Márquez refers to as un loro digital (“a digital parrot”) in his address. In contrast, he mentions that journalists of his generation learned on the job, empirically in newsrooms. They constructed their craft and relied on notepads and excellent listening skills—now replaced by the digital parrot.2 In García Márquez’s view of a previous era of journalism in the Americas , vocation and passion for the work are presented as the key elements that make this “the greastest trade in the world.” Despite this long-standing perception of status, ethics, and respectability in public discourse, it is paradoxical that the work of journalists in contemporary Latin America is dangerous even as most of the region has transitioned from dictatorial regimes to democracy, especially since the 1980s and 1990s. Censorship and other dangerous limitations on press freedoms persist even if sometimes they are not as overt as they were during times of repression and regimes of exception and suspension of constitutional guarantees. “Peace” and “postwar” are sometimes overused and overlapping words in the neoliberal context of Central America, where a growing sense of everyday physical danger and fear 1 Tracing the Borderless in “Departamento 15” “ 20 SALVADORAN IMAGINARIES emerge as facets and manifestations of a new subjectivity and sense of individual insecurity. Media sometimes give voice to these subjectivities and the imaginary of urban fear, even replacing the deficiencies of the state apparatus : “It does not go without saying that the media has started to make up for the state system—at least in collective imaginaries—which has become incompetent when it comes to facing corruption and social violence. The media acts as both the prosecutor who makes accusations and the judge who responds to the very same charges, since the legal order operates with impunity ” (Rotker 2002, 10). This sense of danger and everyday fear continues to test the passion, ethical compass, professionalism, and vocation of journalists. The IAPA maintains data and documentation concerning violence against journalists and restrictions to freedom of the press in its annual country reports. The 2009 country report for El Salvador, for instance, highlighted the murder of Spanish-French photojournalist Christian Poveda, who during his time in El Salvador had been working on La vida loca, a documentary about gangs that operated in some areas of San Salvador .3 More recently, the IAPA reports have highlighted crimes and censorship against Honduran and Mexican journalists as they cover the political and social violence in their countries, violence that is related to drug trafficking, human rights abuses, and unstable state institutions as it feeds a climate of impunity, political instability, and insecurity. In El Salvador, the lack of personal security can be both newsworthy subject and occupational hazard of the reporter’s daily work, as much as it is the preoccupation of the everyday Salvadoran. This has been the case for decades, particularly since the 1980s civil war. Mark Pedelty unveils this relationship between terror and newsworthiness in War Stories, his ethnography of foreign correspondents in El Salvador. Pedelty discusses the work of journalists from media institutions in the United States and Europe, tracing their relationship to their work and to the contrasting perspectives of Salvadoran journalists who had a different social and political connection to their nation’s violence. Clearly, reporters of all nationalities took risks, in part because they knew that it was important for their professional identity as war correspondents. Pedelty provides us with a sense of narrative time and place, “a place which so fascinates and horrifies these reporters that many have lingered long beyond ‘the story.’ It is a space within which they have developed their identities as Salvador reporters ” (Pedelty 1995, 22; emphasis original).4 The Salvadoran civil war ended in...

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