By IPS Correspondents
SAN JUAN, Aug 14 2002 (IPS)

Local press covering the island’s first-ever International Conference on Peace and Development, in an unusual twist, became themselves the news story when conference organisers laced into what they called “hysterical and rude” writing on an event devoted to peace.

In one of several critical stories, the English-language paper San Juan Star sparked controversy with its claim today that the three-day gathering, attended by distinguished political and cultural icons, along with human rights activists from various corners of the world, had a pricetag of “many millions of dollars.”

Senator Miriam Ramirez of the New Progressive Party, maintained that there was a silence around the “real cost” of the conference, which she characterised as “a platform to attack our country, the United States of America, particularly in a time of war.”

Responding to the media reports, the president of the Senate of Puerto Rico, Antonio Fas Alzamora, expressed his “deep sadness and profound patriotic embarrassment,” over what he called “low blows, both rude and hysterical,” by the press against the meeting organised by his legislative chamber together with the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Development.

Fas Alzamora said that the forum is expected to cost approximately 400,000 dollars and that by Friday a final balance of expenses will be made public, including sponsorships and attendance fees.

To the 35 international guests who attended the conference, the senator offered his apologies if anyone was offended by the sensational media reports.

Robert Savio, the Italian-Argentine founder of IPS and panellist in the conference, rejected the efforts to divert the forum from its focus on peace by raising claims of alleged expenses, noting that “when there is talk of war, the expenses are never mentioned.”

Savio, secretary-general of the International Development Society, observed that military manoeuvres of the U.S. marines on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques in one day clearly spend much more than was spent on the forum.

He recalled that at the beginning of the 1990s, some 900 million dollars was invested in the so-called humanitarian operation in Somalia which managed to distribute only 90 million dollars worth of food.

Further, the journalist said, in the offensive against Afghanistan after the Sep 11 attacks on the United States last year, some 13 billion dollars was spent, but of the 3.0 billion needed by the new Afghan government to reconstruct that country, only 150 million dollars was received from the international community.

Savio gave the introduction to the first panel of the conference on “Creators of Illusion” which attempted to analyze the role of the communications industry and artists in the creation of a new globalisation ethic.

Speakers at the panel included reporter Luis Coss, comic writer and cartoonist Silverio Pérez and singer Danny Rivera, of Puerto Rico, along with the former Costa Rican vice minister of Culture, Mimi Prado.

At the second panel on “Creators of Illusion”, Puerto Rican pop star Ricky Martin shared the podium with Israeli pacifist Sara Osacky Lazar, Puerto Rican actor and poet Jacobo Morales, and Colombian journalist, author and script writer Fernando Gaitan.

Gaitan, creator of the highly-successful “Betty la Fea” Latin American teleseries, was asked how was it possible to write such an amusing, entertaining show in one the most violent countries in the world.

“The role that we have taken as writers, as playrights, is to keep alive that other part of Colombia which still exists”, that it is not all violence, barbarism and kidnapping, Gaitan explained.

“We – the so-called creators of illusion – have the primary obligation to rescue humanity’s highest values and translate them into a message conducive to well-being, happiness, peaceful co-existence and sustainable development for humanity,” singer Martin said.

“I invite the press,” he continued, “so interested in sharing and disseminating my artistic achievements to accompany me to an orphanage, to centers for special education or to listen to me at events like the one I am taking part in now.” Martin gives support to institutions which aid abandoned infants, such as in Calcutta, India.

Perspectives such as these strengthen a critical vision towards communications media and the demand that media act with a sense of social responsibility as it faces an information industry characterized by merchandising and triviality, both Coss and Mimi Prado pointed out.

Savio listed the political, economic and structural factors that force the press to submit to the laws of the market and convert them into promotors of an order that, above all, after Sep 11, portrays the world as a stage in the struggle “between good and evil.”

“We are in a world that is difficult to read, fragmented, in which information is made up of random events, not of processes,” the founder of IPS observed, warning that journalists faced a great challenge just to “maintain the right to think.”

Fragmentation makes the press highlight suicide bombings in Palestine while ignoring the fact that in Sri Lanka there have been more suicide bombings that in the entire Middle East conflict, or that Puerto Ricans remain unaware that the situation in the island of Vieques is the same as that of all territorities used for military exercises, Savio said.

The journalist, in his presentation, noted that as the number of newspaper readers continues to decline, a new channel of information to society has opened up through the internet, where citizens will not only be receivers of news but will be interactively engaged in it. (FIN/IPS/WD/DV MC/TRA-SO LV/GGR/02)

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