Argentine television journalist Juan Carlos Zambrano was shot to death Wednesday morning in the northern province of Jujuy.
Two unidentified men approached Zambrano, host of the daily news and the weekly opinion programme “Con la Gente” (With the People) on local television station Canal 7, outside his home in the provincial capital of San Salvador de Jujuy around 2:30am, according to reports in the Argentine press. The assailants shot him at close range on the chest at least once, his colleague Javier Angel Díaz said. The journalist was pronounced dead at the scene.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is investigating possible links between Zambrano’s death and his work. “We offer our deepest condolences to Juan Carlos Zambrano’s family and colleagues,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said. “We will be tracking the investigation carefully.”
Jujuy police arrested an unidentified man two hours after the shooting, according to local news reports. Authorities reportedly believe Zambrano’s death was a crime of passion.
However, Díaz told CPJ that Zambrano had received repeated threats to his cell phone and to Canal 7 offices over the last year. The callers told the reporter to “shut up or die,” he said. Zambrano’s colleague said he believes the journalist was killed because of his reporting on local government corruption.
But officials in charge of investigating the killing are less and less inclined to think his murder was linked to his work as producer and presenter of a weekly news programme on local TV station Canal 7, Paris-based Reporters sans Grontières (RSF) has reported.
It is now being reported that Fernando Chauque, 34, a man arrested immediately after the shooting on suspicion of being one of the two perpetrators, had an affair with Zambrano’s 22-year-old live-in girlfriend, who was with him when he was gunned down outside his home.
Investigating judge Juan Carlos Nieves was quoted by the Argentine Journalism Forum (FOPEA), a press freedom organisation, as saying: “There is no evidence that links this murder to Zambrano’s work as a journalist.” Zambrano’s lawyer, Bruno Aguila, now shares this view.
Some of Zambrano’s colleagues, including some of his superiors at Canal 7, still do not completely rule out the possibility of a link between the murder and his work. They point to the threats he recently received and to the fact that on March 14 demonstrators attacked the home of ruling Peronist party senator Guillermo Jenefes, the owner of the Radio Visión Jujuy media group that includes Canal 7.
