Word: salvadors
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...Salvador, truth is elusive, danger too dose
...Camino Real hotel in San Salvador, where most of them stay, the 200-odd foreign journalists in El Salvador daily swap stories of near misses and miraculous escapes. In one episode a photographer rolled under his car just in time to elude bullets blasting from a helicopter gunship overhead. In another, a van carrying an NBC crew had its windows blown out; the passengers got away unhurt save for cuts from flying glass. Such adventures are often recounted with black humor, and justified on the grounds of competitive pressure. Says one U.S. newsman: "If another network gets a story...
...last week brought a frightening reminder of what every journalist in El Salvador knows beneath the bravado: that danger is more than barroom folklore. Four Dutch TV newsmen set out to film rebel encampments near the dusty village of Santa Rita in northern Chalatenango Department. They arrived to meet guerrilla contacts at 5 p.m. Ten minutes later, villagers heard prolonged shooting. Eight people died. The four Dutchmen were shot repeatedly at close range, and their bodies were quickly removed to the capital by Salvadoran soldiers. The army claimed that they died in a firefight, but most reporters suspected that instead...
...sudden specter of violent death-the first of a foreign journalist in El Salvador since early last year when Photographer Olivier Rebbot was shot-heightened the pressures of covering a war that is in some measure a staged media event. Both Secretary of State Alexander Haig and El Salvador's Marxist-dominated rebels say that the government of President José Napoleón Duarte cannot last without U.S. military aid. Thus both sides are fighting partly to influence American opinion. When New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal returned this month from a tour to "get the feeling...
...journalists is irksome, but it has provided a check on facts and, more important, judgment. Many reporters are new to the country and do not know Spanish. Network crews, for example, stay only three to five weeks and might not return there. Some of the reporters in El Salvador have little experience reporting. When one young newspaperman tried to tell a tableful of war-wise colleagues that 5,000 refugees had been trapped and shelled by government forces-the essence of a rebel propaganda broadcast-the graybeards picked the story apart. Only a handful of bodies had been found. There...