To visit José Rubén Zamora you have to pass three military checkpoints, climb a path in the middle of the forest under the gaze of soldiers who watch from their sentry boxes and extend your arm so that they can put a stamp on you, the mark that gives access to crossing a penultimate fence that protects the cell in which the most emblematic journalist in the recent history of Guatemala has been imprisoned for 569 days.
There, protected by six agents - sometimes up to eight - in a small cubicle with a bunk bed, a table, chairs, many books, some family photos and a bathroom, the journalist who embodies better than anyone what in another era called the fourth estate receives the visitor with a clear message: he does not give up.
“I am serene, calm.
Ready to spend three months or 100 years here,” says this 67-year-old man, in a conversation of more than three hours with EL PAÍS in his cell at the Mariscal Zavala military barracks.
A prison that houses everything from drug traffickers to businessmen and politicians detained for corruption and high-profile cases.
Zamora arrives at the Judicial Branch of Guatemala on February 5. Danilo Ramírez (EFE)
The founder of
elPeriódico
—
a newspaper that was forced to close in May 2023 due to the siege by the authorities — faces an accusation of money laundering, a crime that he has always denied.
Various international organizations have criticized “serious procedural violations” in a case that they consider a clear attack on freedom of expression due to the dozens of publications that revealed acts of corruption during the Government of Alejandro Giammattei.
The new president, Bernardo Arévalo, considers the same, who has described it as “political persecution of the press.”
Although Zamora was sentenced to six years, an appeals court overturned the sentence last October, and ordered a repeat trial.
Despite the torture that he claims he suffered in the first 17 months of captivity during the previous Administration, he seems incombustible.
“I have always been aware that I was not going to let myself be defeated,” he warns.
And furthermore, “now I am the boss,” he jokes when referring to the substantial improvement in his conditions with the arrival of the new Government of Guatemala.
For three weeks now, Zamora, with tanned skin, combed white hair and a thick mustache, no longer has to spend 23 hours a day in isolation in a dark and dusty cell that caused him eye problems, in which he lost 17 kilos, and in which he suffered insect plagues that made furrows in his skin or tore it.
“I added Baygon but, for them, it was like having a Negroni, like an appetizer, it made them hungrier,” she laughs.
He, however, became poisoned by the insecticide, which caused hives on his skin.
Furthermore, his prolonged stay in prison has caused him to lose myelin in the nervous system, a substance that facilitates the transmission of impulses.
Now, says this man who is 1.87 meters tall and weighs 64 kilos, even the weight of a blanket on top of his body hurts.
Cover of 'El Periódico' when the Zamora family had to go into exile in 2003.
In recent weeks, the journalist no longer suffers the constant threats or forceful searches that did not allow him to sleep in peace, and he no longer has cameras pointed at him that recorded him all the time.
The new authorities have also built windows in the upper part of his cell, given him lights and hot water, allowed him to receive more visitors, and allowed him to move freely between the cubicle that has been his home for the last year and a half. and the small space before the first fence that protects him, a strip of cement and another of grass just over six meters along which he runs for an hour a day imagining the circuit of the daily run he did before being arrested. : eight kilometers along Avenida Las Américas, from the monument of Pope John Paul II to the Industrial Bank.
President Arévalo said in early February that the case against Zamora was “spurious” and that it was created “as an attempt to turn it into an exemplary punishment” as a warning for his publications.
And although the Executive insists on respect for the independence of powers and that the process must take its course through a judicial channel that they also distrust, since he came to power they have made an effort to ensure that the journalist has decent conditions in prison.
Furthermore, they have opened the doors of their cell to internal and international scrutiny.
In recent weeks, the founder of
elPeriódico
has received the Minister of the Interior, the leaders of the ruling Semilla party in Congress, the head of penitentiary institutions and representatives of the embassies of the European Union and the United States, in addition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), visits that the previous Administration systematically denied.
Jose Rubén Zamora receives in his cell the special rapporteur for freedom of expression of the IACHR, Pedro Vaca, and the general secretary, Tania Reneaum on February 12. IACHR (EFE/CIDH)
Faced with such a parade of personalities, the guards “now come to ask me for favors,” Zamora confesses.
“But I don't know the Government,” he says.
According to him, the authorities also offered him to move to a “VIP cell” in a military prison where detained politicians, drug traffickers and businessmen replicate the privileges they had outside, but he rejected it.
“It didn't seem ethical to me because I myself had criticized those privileges,” he justifies.
The risk of journalism against power
Industrial engineer by profession and the most irreverent voice of Guatemalan journalism by vocation, José Rubén Zamora began in the eighties as an executive for oil and cement companies, but before the end of the long civil war in Guatemala (1960-1996) he surrendered to journalism .
In 1990 he founded the newspaper
Siglo Veintiuno,
which circulated until 1996, when he launched
elPeriódico.
“I always thought I would make an interesting, powerful, strong newspaper.
He saw him more as an agent of change capable of understanding the country and changing the rules of the game.
This is a country of tactical groups.
Our elites have never embraced democracy, freedom, or transparency.
"His convictions are more with oligopolies, monopolies and political corporatism," he says, sitting on a plastic chair in his cell, which Juan Pablo, the son of Petronila, the Zamora family's lifelong employee, has just cleaned. .
Since his wife had to go into exile nine months ago, he is the one who brings her food to the prison every Tuesday and Saturday.
On the day of the visit, the young man also takes some of the suits with which the journalist appears immaculate before the judge.
He must clean them up for his next hearing, scheduled for February 21.
The publications of its media—which employed hundreds of journalists—tell the contemporary history of the country.
His agenda was always full of sources willing to reveal the perversions of politics and business: politicians, artists, police officers, judges and diplomats made revelations that were later contrasted by his team and others that he recounted in his column El Peladero
.
.
His research earned him the respect of a part of the population and international prestige: Zamora has received the Maria Moors Cabot award from Columbia University, the title of one of the 50 heroes of press freedom of the 20th century from the International Institute of the Boston Press and the King of Spain for journalism.
But confronting the great powers can be very expensive.
In its three decades of life,
elPeriódico
had to fight dozens of lawsuits, and Jose Rubén Zamora has suffered attacks, threats, kidnappings and even an attempted murder.
“I always joked with my dentist that one day he was going to have to go look for me in a vacant lot to identify me by my teeth,” he says.
Something that could very well have happened in 2008, when they kidnapped him and beat him up until he was unconscious.
“They broke my [vertebral] disc into three fragments.
They took me to the hospital and I had bacteria in my blood for six months,” he recalls.
elPeriódico workers in the media's presses, on August 2, 2022.LUIS ECHEVERRIA (REUTERS)
By then, part of the Zamora family was already living in exile, in the United States.
They had left the country in 2003 after an assault at their home.
The kidnappers made his wife and three children believe that they had killed the journalist.
Shortly after, he returned to Guatemala.
Nothing stopped him from continuing with his investigations.
He was also invited to give journalism talks in different parts of the world in which, he says, he actually taught “financial theology, or how to make the eight miracles come together to pay the payroll,” one of the great challenges that always had his newspaper.
As cases of corruption that affected the powerful were revealed, advertisers left due to pressure from the different governments.
“Otto Pérez Molina took 40 million quetzales [almost five million euros] from my best clients: he threatened the four telephone companies, a cement company, a brewery...,” he lists.
Meanwhile, Zamora liquidated his own assets (houses, cars, watches, works that were given to him) to maintain the newspaper.
He says that he did it “out of conviction.”
Convicted lawyers
In 2018, Zamora received a call from the Public Ministry (MP) with an invitation.
The head of the Prosecutor's Office, Consuelo Porras, a controversial figure sanctioned by the United States for stopping anti-corruption investigations, wanted to see him.
Since then, “one Monday of every month she invited me to her office.”
At that time, she had an open war with the head of the Special Prosecutor's Office Against Impunity in Guatemala (FECI), Juan Francisco Sandoval, who was investigating alleged cases of corruption in the Giammattei Government and was close to Zamora.
“The lady didn't want it.
“She wanted to expel him from the MP and that, when she expelled him, I would be neutralized,” she points out.
These meetings extended until mid-2021, when
elPeriódico
published the “Russian plot”, an investigation that revealed the arrival in Guatemala of a group of businessmen from that country who were seeking a mining concession in exchange for bribes and whose evidence was delivered to Sandoval.
The story included juicy details like a rug full of bills that were supposedly given to Giammattei for his campaign.
The revelation of the case caused the exile of the FECI prosecutor and the end of Porras' invitations to Zamora.
“She called me the MP for the last time very angry,” he remembers.
On that occasion, the prosecutor no longer received him in her office, but at a “long and sloppy” table and gave him a threatening three-hour speech in which she never looked him in the eye.
“She told me that, as a child, she had been taught not to be beaten or humiliated by anyone,” she remembers.
Shortly after, a MP source warned him that they were looking for anything to incriminate him.
So, he began what he considers a “constant hunt.”
The accounts of elPeriódico
and his own
were seized .
In July 2022, 18 agents wearing balaclavas and carrying rifles broke into his house to arrest him and send him to prison.
That day, the offices of elPeriódico were also raided
.
Zamora did not know what he was accused of until the first hearing, nor could he have contact with his lawyers, who did not have access to his file to defend him.
Journalists interview José Zamora, in July 2022.LUIS ECHEVERRIA (REUTERS)
The complaint for which they incriminated him came from a former banker who in the past had been a source for Zamora, who accused him of forcing him to launder 300,000 quetzales (about 35,000 euros), money that the journalist admits existed, although he says it is legal and that he obtained it from the sale of a painting gift from a Guatemalan artist friend of his, Elmar Rojas, which he used to finance his newspaper.
An impartiality report published this month by TrialWatch, of the Clooney Foundation for Justice, found “numerous violations of international and regional standards,” in a process in which Zamora had to resort to 10 defense attorneys, four of whom were also the subject of criminal proceedings.
“It is one of the most absurd processes I have seen,” says one of those lawyers, Juan Francisco Solórzano Foppa.
“They never allowed a defense to be exercised.
And when we had a clear line of defense to demonstrate the origin of the money, what they did was attack us as a defense, criminalize us and put us in prison.”
Zamora's capture was also interpreted as a warning to other journalists.
“José Rubén Zamora is a mentor of Guatemalan journalism and was president of
elPeriódico
, which was in the top three of influence in this country and which, after his arrest, disappeared.
"We are talking about something disruptive, something instructive and symbolic effects that go beyond the judicial results," the IACHR's special rapporteur for freedom of expression, Pedro Vaca, tells EL PAÍS.
The future
The Zamora family requests that in the new trial the journalist be allowed to present evidence and witnesses so as not to repeat the previous flawed process.
In addition, they demand that, while the oral part of the trial is repeated, the founder of
elPeriódico
be granted house arrest, “as established by law.”
But he is aware that it can take a long time.
“It is possible that he could be released to house arrest in the next three years.
Being realistic, I prefer to think that I will continue here to be serene and calm,” he says.
His greatest wish is for guarantees to be given for his wife to return from exile.
José Rubén Zamora, journalist, in a cell in Guatemala City, on July 30, 2022.EDWIN BERCIÁN (EFE)
And although the new president has promised “new air” and to work so that there are no more journalists imprisoned “for fulfilling their function of reporting freely and responsibly,” Zamora is cautious in his expectations: “Arévalo only has control of the Executive, The judiciary continues to be a multiparty narco-kleptodictatorship that remained disguised and that, with Giammattei, took off its disguise.”
In a way, they both share the same situation.
The judge handling the Zamora case—Freddy Orellana—is also the one who unleashed a hunt against Arévalo's party.
For this reason, the journalist believes that Arévalo should approach the dispute with prosecutor Consuelo Porras differently, whom the president accused last year of leading a coup d'état to prevent her inauguration, and remove her from office.
“That lady has committed and continues to commit flagrant crimes.
It is evident and continuous.
You have to read it like this or the president is going to end up in my neighborhood,” he warns.
Zamora knows that, when he gets out of prison, there are expectations that he will start another newspaper, but his son asks him to go live in the United States in a small house facing the sea.
The strength certainly does not seem to be lacking in this man who has been the protagonist and privileged witness of the history of Guatemala in the last four decades.
“I think I am God's favorite son.
If I'm here, it has some meaning.
I must have a great heavenly diaspora,” he says before parting.
And he makes a last wish: “Someday I want the State of Guatemala to apologize to me and for Ángel González—a media businessman who often attacks him—to broadcast those images for three hours during the hour of highest
ratings
.”
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