Alianza Paraguay: Why Forbidden Stories launched a global investigation into organized crime

But on the morning of September 6, 2022, Humberto didn’t call. Gloria found it strange, but went to work anyway. Hours later, during a break, she noticed two missed calls from Humberto. She sent a message in Guarani, Paraguay’s Indigenous language, teasing him. “Why do you think you can just call me during my work hours like that?”

The next time she checked her phone, she nearly fell from her chair. She had dozens of missed calls from her siblings, relatives, and friends. Humberto, she learned, had been shot and killed. “I’ll never forget that date, the 6th of September,” she remembered. “Never, ever, ever did I think that could happen to him.” 

Shot eight times as he exited his car in front of Radio Amambay, Humberto was the 18th journalist killed in Paraguay since 1991. Nearly half of them–seven total–have been found dead in Pedro Juan. 

Pedro Juan shares a dry border with Ponta Porã in Brazil. In this dusty city of 127,000 residents, Spanish mixes with Portuguese and Guarani as cars weave between the two countries free from any controls. 

Because of its strategic location in the heart of South America, Pedro Juan is a key node in illegal trafficking circuits–including weapons, cigarettes, cars, and drugs–from Bolivia to Brazil and on to ports in Europe. It’s a dangerous city in general, but particularly for journalists. Journalists are killed in Pedro Juan at a similar rate to Acapulco, in Mexico, which is known for its cartel violence and where journalists are also often targeted. Others have been forced to flee the country. Those who remain are forced to self-censor.  

In early 2024, Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to pursue the work of journalists who have been killed, imprisoned or kidnapped for their work, launched Alianza Paraguay alongside partners at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and 5 other media outlets across Latin America and Europe. We gathered a consortium of international journalists to continue the work of reporters silenced in Paraguay, investigating how corruption and mismanagement has turned this South American country into a danger zone for the press and a haven for criminal activities of all sorts.

Our months-long investigation, released today, is based on dozens of interviews, ground reporting, and first-hand access to documents by our investigative team.

The documents accessed by Forbidden Stories and its partners suggest that Paraguay’s top prosecutors—whose job it is to investigate organized crime—failed to properly investigate rampant impunity in Paraguay. We found that the Prosecutor’s Office regularly ignored requests from neighboring countries to investigate criminal activities or extradite known drug traffickers. Amidst this impunity, investigations into journalist deaths, advocates and concerned family members say, have stagnated. 

In 2022, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Paraguayan state guilty of failing to investigate the 1991 assassination of Santiago Leguizamón Zaván, an intrepid reporter who covered organized crime in Pedro Juan. 

Dante Leguizamón, who was 13 years old when his father was gunned down in Pedro Juan, said the Paraguayan Prosecutor’s Office repeatedly failed to respond to simple requests, such as the translation of documents, indicating their reticence to take on cases linked to organized crime. 

Dr. Camilo Cantero, who was 28 when his sister, radio journalist Yamila Cantero, was killed on July 6, 2002 in San Patricio, near the Argentine border, echoed this frustration. In the more than two decades since her death, the Paraguayan Prosecutor’s Office has never once reached out to them and even lost the paper file of her case, he alleged. “Sooner or later, the Paraguayan state must give our family a proper answer,” Cantero said. “The official version from 23 years ago—that it was a ‘crime of passion’—never convinced us.”

In a similar case, on February 12, 2020, Cintia González was sitting down to dinner with her husband, Lourenço “Leo” Veras, when two gunmen entered and shot Veras in front of her. For nearly a year after the murder, she said, prosecutors never brought her in for questioning, despite her having witnessed the assassination. 

(The Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Paraguay did not respond to our specific questions. They provided a general statement summarizing the status of various journalist killing cases. The national police and individual prosecutors and former prosecutors cited in this story did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)