As a college student in Denton County, Texas, in the 1970s, Fernando Paulsen learned the importance of circumventing jurisdictional boundaries. Denton was dry; students were shit out of luck when it came to buying alcohol.
But one county over, the liquor flowed freely. So whenever he wanted a taste, Paulsen would simply hop on the highway with his buddies, cross the county line, stock up on liquor and beer, then head home and swill cocktails to his heart's content.
Now executive editor of Chile's largest daily newspaper, La Tercera, Paulsen is using the same strategy to flout the legal system. Only this time, Paulsen lives where liquor flows free, but speech doesn't.
The Chilean press corps - in one of Latin America's most stable democracies - received a shock 17 June when a judge ordered the entire press corps to stop publishing or broadcasting stories about the case of "El Cabro Carrera," the largest drug scandal in the country's history.
"This is the kind of thing that normally happens in a dictatorial regime," an astonished Paulsen said in an interview with Wired News on Friday. "In a democratic society, the judicial system can't expect everything to grind to a halt while they're trying to sort out what's what."
El Cabro Carrera first hit Latin American headlines in April, when the State Defense Council arrested Mario Silva, head of the nation's largest drug cartel. The arrest, which came at the tail end of a three-year investigation, sprawled to Belgium, Holland, and Italy, where some 14 Europeans were nabbed as part of the international cocaine ring. Back home, 10 other cartel members were arrested, and members of the judiciary, police department, and military were implicated in the investigation. The press, which Paulsen characterizes as having dwindled into some degree of complacent flaccidity in the seven years since the Pinochet dictatorship fell, jumped on the story with rare investigative vigor.
Then, last Monday, presiding judge Beatriz Pedrals jumped on the press. Claiming that relentless coverage was polluting the judicial process, she pulled out an obscure 50-year-old provision of the Chilean penal code and quashed all domestic stories about the case.
The entire Chilean press corps was incensed. Senen Conjeros, president of the Colegio de Periodistas, Chile's largest journalists' association, called for the media to defy the judge. Chile's Media Federation condemned the order. So did President Eduardo Frei.
And at La Tercera, Paulsen started scrambling for a way to get around the prohibition. It wasn't long before he, a team of lawyers, and a CD-ROM designer hit on a solution: Put up an exclusive edition of the paper on the Internet, but route it through a server in the United States. After all, per capita, Chile boasts more PCs than any other Latin American country. And jurisdictionally, Pedrals' order wouldn't have any teeth.
"It's exactly the same thing as when I was in Denton," Paulsen said, "except now people jump on a modem to go outside the border, retrieve the news, and bring it home."
As of Friday, its third full day online, the site had gotten some 10,000 hits a day. "Apart from showing how useless this type of restriction is in an era of global access," Paulsen said, "this will give us some interesting insight into how many Chileans are interested enough and able to get their information online."
