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The founder of the newest Spanish-language newspaper in Greater Cincinnati is not new to the profession. Renan Gorriti, director and publisher of the weekly El Pueblo, is a Peruvian journalist seeking political asylum in the United States.
El Pueblo calls itself “El Periodico de la Raza,” or “the people’s newspaper.” The paper first appeared in September 2005; it now distributes 7,000 copies at 400 locations in Cincinnati, Dayton and Northern Kentucky. The paper is free, with production and distribution costs covered by advertising revenue.
Born and raised in the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, Gorriti has spent most of his professional life in Peru. He’s worked as a journalist for the past 35 years and began his 40-year teaching career working with elementary school-aged children in poor communities.
He later taught secondary school and courses at his alma mater, the University of Lima. The two professions are almost symbiotic, according to Gorriti.
“Educators communicate but, alas, journalists educate,” he says.
Threatened in Peru
Gorriti has written for a variety of Peruvian periodicals as well as publications in Brazil, Mexico and Spain. But perhaps most notably he was the co-director of a government-opposition newspaper in Peru, Da Larazon, or “Reason.”
The paper’s investigations and criticisms of President Alejandro Toledo led Gorriti to believe that he had acquired “a lot of political enemies.”
Da Larazon investigated and reported on the now widely substantiated accusation that Toledo’s party, Peru Posible, forged thousands of signatures to register for the 2000 elections. Gorriti says he felt personally threatened, especially after Da Larazon published investigative reports accusing Toledo of using the state-owned oil company, Petro Peru, to give “contracts to his friends from the state company to give gasoline (and selling the oil) to commercial airlines, but there were no airlines!
“And so it’s believed that the petroleum was then going to drug dealers and so the fuel was going to buy dealers’ planes in the tropics, Turbo A-1s, which has been commonly used to transfer coca leaves, which is a sacred and miraculous leaf for people of Peruvian ancestry to Incan people. But the leaf can be used for conversion of high quality cocaine.”
The drug trade has led to corruption and poverty in Peru, according to Gorriti.
“Justice systems in Latin America have become highly politicalized, and ‘politics’ has also become ‘judicialized,’ ” he says. “Anyone who is a political critic or opponent will be charged, investigated and imprisoned. The threats generally come from the organizations of the intelligentsia and also from the people who launder money for the drug dealers and (they can use) very subtle methods. … Yes, I felt that I should come to the U.S. because of threats of reprisals from the Peruvian president and the drug dealers.”
This is the second extended stay in the United States for Gorriti, his wife and son. His previous visit was as an author of four books: Mysterious Peru: The Image of an Unknown Country; Love and Struggle; Mestizo Voices; and The History of Peru: From the Late Classical Period of the Incas to Present Times.
Upon his return here, Gorriti says that he “wanted to contribute by publishing a newspaper that serves to orient and assist the 150,000 Latinos in Ohio.”
Since 2000 the area defined by Boone, Campbell and Kenton counties in Kentucky and Butler, Clermont, Hamilton and Warren counties in Ohio has collectively experienced a 34 percent increase in their Hispanic populations, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The seven-county area’s Latino population now totals an estimated 29,000.
‘It’s urgent’
That total doesn’t include many undocumented workers, and they’re an important part of the audience El Pueblo hopes to reach. Undocumented immigrants should be concerned because they’re being demonized and marginalized under the guises of national security interests and unfair labor competition and by old-fashioned xenophobia, according to Gorriti.
Latino immigrants contribute significantly to the national and regional economies through their labor, taxes and consumer purchases but have essentially been driven underground, he says.
Before establishing El Pueblo, Gorriti was a contributor to La Jornada Latina (“The Spanish Journal”), a weekly newspaper in Greater Cincinnati. For an English-only reader, there is one notable difference between the two publications. La Jornada Latina includes a brief two- to three-page “Spanglish” section for English-only readers.
Gorriti says he’d also like to publish an English version of El Pueblo.
“Yes, we need to do that,” he says. “It’s urgent, and that’s because American people are very hospitable and it’s an insult to their intelligence that they’re not sufficiently informed about Latin American issues.”
Gorriti says another difference between the two papers is El Pueblo‘s focus on immigrant issues.
“We’re a local newspaper primarily focused on local issues,” he says, “and within that we take on issues of immigrants and their basic needs — what affects them as workers, their social problems and educational issues, legal status issues, etc. We also look at issues of immigration in other states of the United States, and we also look at issues which touch on the countries of origin of these immigrants and so we try to explain the relationship between the problems they have here in the United States and the problems in their own country and the relationship between their countries and the United States.”
He points to a recent border patrol shooting that resulted in an immigrant’s death.
“Violence will not solve any problem,” Gorriti says. “If you build more walls, there will be more problems.”
He draws an analogy between border walls and punitive legal-status barriers.
“The United States needs more labor for its development,” he says. “Latinos are a great source of labor and help. We pay our taxes, even though we cannot get anything back from them.”
Gorriti supports the proposed McCain-Kennedy immigration reform as a progressive measure to address the legal status that hundreds of thousands of immigrants find themselves in.
“The McCain-Kennedy bill would permit the legalization of Latin American immigrants in this country who have demonstrated a proven work history in this country,” Gorriti says.
He also has concerns about trade agreements and policies in both the United States and Central and South America. He cites the disparity in farm subsidies provided by the United States and its trading partners.
“The laws are imposed by the strongest countries, and the poorer countries are dependent on the richer countries,” Gorriti says. “We should have a globalization without mental borders and with greater knowledge and concern about the human condition.” ©
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2006.
