BRAZIL: Murder in the Sun

As a reporter for the newspaper O Momento in the provincial capital of Goiania (pop. 55,430), Haroldo Gurgel, 22, knew that he had made some powerful political enemies. When he left his hotel one morning last week, four gunmen jumped him, dragged him to the city’s central square. There, before a crowd of horror-stricken townspeople, they pushed Gurgel against a wall, pistol-whipped him half-unconscious, then pumped twelve bullets into him as he tried to crawl away. Two men who tried to help him were wounded. After that, the murderers calmly pocketed their pistols and strolled away, while the bystanders cautiously moved in to pick up the dead man and his friends.

It was not hard to find the immediate provocation for the brutal murder. The day before, O Momento had published a story by Reporter Gurgel aimed at Pedro Ludovico Teixeira, governor of the state of Goiaz and the newspaper’s prime political enemy. It charged that Pedro Arantes, whom the governor had appointed head of the Electric Energy Commission, was running the state’s drastic power rationing to suit himself. The paper printed its attack under the headline HE CAME AND PRODUCED LIGHT. Soon after the story appeared, Arantes met the reporter on the street, slapped him across the face.

That was a warning, but no one expected the bloodshed that followed next day. Outrage flared throughout the state and nation. Students went on strike. Bar and press associations demanded justice. Only then did Governor Teixeira publicly disclaim responsibility for the murder and order, Arantes removed from his post. But the power commissioner and his gunmen had already left town.

No Goiaz cops seemed to be in any hurry to make an arrest. One police captain who had denounced Gurgel’s murder to his chief was even disciplined for insubordination. But at week’s end no cop had yet dared to erase from a plaster wall in the square the words someone had dabbed there with a stick dipped in Reporter Gurgel’s blood: HERE DIED A JOURNALIST DEFENDING FREEDOM OF THE PRESS.