Yes, we reporters might get stuck covering the late shift or -- egad! -- a parade. When disaster strikes or a source calls back on deadline, the nights can be long. Newspaper layoffs and hard economic times can cast a pall over just about everything we do.
But those concerns seem a piffle every time I read dispatches from around the world about journalists who, fighting for the story, also must fight for their lives.
The day before Christmas, an international group condemned the protracted torture of a journalist in Pakistan. And militant Maoists ransacked the offices of an opposition newspaper in Nepal. Its crime? Using acronyms for two of the militant groups without distinguishing between them.
A couple of days later, news arrived that Zimbabwean journalist and human rights activist Jestina Mukoko had been accused of plotting to overthrow the government. Mukoko -- already in custody for challenging Robert Mugabe, the thug who runs her country -- could face death.
Sadly, real press freedom remains elusive even closer to home, as revealed by another story just over our southern border.
Two days before Christmas, a 15-year-old Mexican boy held a news conference in El Paso to detail how his reporter father had been held -- without charges -- for six months. The perpetrators were not shadowy foreign agents or some sketchy dictator, but the United States government and its immigration service.
The story grows out of the drug violence that has beset Mexico and left more than 5,300 people dead this year. Since 2000, 44 journalists have been killed in Mexico, many of them targeted for writing about the drug gangs that dominate the country.
The military crackdown on the drug lords has created its own problems. And that's what brought reporter Emilio Gutierrez Soto of El Diario del Noroeste into the story.
In 2005, he wrote that some soldiers were drunk when they raided a hotel in northern Chihuahua state. Other stories reported alleged thievery by the military. Last spring, a squad of soldiers and their commanding officer invited Gutierrez to a restaurant in his hometown of Ascension. They told him he would pay with his life if he continued. They ordered him not to tell anyone about the meeting.
Gutierrez, 46, promptly wrote another story, in which he recounted the alleged death threat. A few nights later, he said, a pounding on the door awoke him and his son.
