EFRAÍN VARELA KNEW HE WOULD BE MURDERED. He even knew the options his assassins would consider. “If they kill me in the town, they are going to shoot me,” he told his fellow journalists two weeks before his death. “If they take me in the rural area, I am going to be tortured first.” Varela specialized in exposing paramilitary atrocities and corrupt politicians in Arauca, a remote town on Colombia’s lawless plains. Over the years he’d refused bribes and survived other assassination attempts. Then, in June 2002, a hair’s-breadth escape from kidnappers convinced him his moment was near. Against the advice of his colleagues, he continued his exposés, until, as he’d predicted, he was seized in the countryside, tortured and shot.

When most people think of journalists dying for a story, they picture war correspondents caught in a cross fire, but Varela’s death is a more typical case. Almost three-quarters of the more than 720 journalists who have died in the line of duty since 1992 have been targeted and murdered. The majority of the fallen—more than 85 percent—have been local journalists. Almost all the masterminds of these murders—95 percent—have escaped punishment.

I first encountered this plague of murder-with-impunity while researching a book in the Philippines between 2000 and 2003. Fourteen journalists were assassinated outside Manila during that period and not one of their killers was brought to justice. Philippine press freedom advocates complained to the nation’s president that many of the slain had been publicly threatened by politicians and businessmen. The Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism predicted worse to come if the perpetrators were not prosecuted. None were, and in 2004 another eight journalists were murdered after being warned to stay silent.

The international organizations that attempted to bring worldwide attention to these unpunished killings were the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and the Paris-based Reporters sans frontières. To government leaders and the general public they made the case that while the murder of any person was reprehensible, the murder of a journalist for his or her reporting had consequences that went far beyond the individual’s death. Journalists stood for the public’s right to know what public figures were doing; they exposed criminality when the police refused to pursue it (or were part of it); and they enlightened communities to the activities of illegal armed groups and terrorists in their area. If journalists could be murdered in retaliation for their work and the killers suffered no consequences, then the societies in which these murders occurred would be at the mercy of sociopaths.

In May 2005, the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a bulletin called “Marked for Death,” reporting that the top five countries where journalists had been assassinated since 2000 were, in order of most killed, the Philippines, Iraq, Colombia, Bangladesh and Russia. These nations were weighted with problems specific to their regions and cultures, but they bore striking similarities in the systematic way criminality was licensed and protected. The journalists, too, bore striking similarities. Most worked low-paying jobs in remote areas controlled by corrupt officials. In their districts, bribery of journalists was the norm, but a lot of those assassinated were famous for being clean. Many had predicted they would be murdered if they kept at their reporting, but they persisted until the bloody end.

Though both the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters sans frontières were scrupulous in their analyses of hundreds of “kill cases,” their summaries of the lives of these journalists were necessarily short, rarely more than an account of their last stories and a paragraph or two of professional résumé. Neither organization attempted to guess at what made these individuals tick. Reading the brief descriptions of the victims left me wondering at the source of their bravery. They had dogged the lives of people who were immune to prosecution but hadn’t lived in the kinds of secure hotels used by foreign correspondents. Often they went home to bungalows with nothing between them and murder but a quarter-inch plywood door. Indeed, a lot of them had publicly announced their intention of pursuing stories in the face of an ethic of impunity that guaranteed retribution. Were they idealists? Egotists? Devout believers in God? Were they motivated by a macho defiance of thugs? A revolutionary’s zeal to help the masses? Perhaps they had become so obsessed with a great story that they were blind to its consequences? Or were their lives so personally buffeted by bandits and death squads that they felt that sacrificing themselves was the price that had to be paid to get the story out?

In the fall of 2005, I chose representative cases in the five most murderous countries and set out to visit their hometowns, interview their families, friends and colleagues, and try to understand their personal motivations. I had two questions in mind:

What makes a poor, small-town reporter stay on a story even though he has been threatened with certain death and offered handsome rewards if he looks the other way?

What is it that allows entire societies to function like criminal enterprises, where truth tellers are publicly killed and no charges are brought against the public figures who ordered the killings?

When journalists are murdered, their lives and work explode, the shards driving deep into the bodies of those closest to them. The people who bore the pieces of these abbreviated lives shared with me the journalists’ private and public sides, noble and flawed. The tales they told revealed that while each risked being murdered according to his or her own unique psychology, these journalists’ professional goals were the same. They believed passionately in the principle that the powerful should be prevented from oppressing the weak. While fallible themselves, they went to work each morning with the conviction that the calling of journalism was to defend the defenseless.

The

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