Freedom Fighter

WE'VE BEEN THROWN OUT OF BETTER

PLACES! exclaimed a headline on the Chicago Tribune editorial page last week. The editorial below explained that Jules Dubois, the Trib's veteran Latin America correspondent, had been permanently barred as an "agitator" from Strongman Rafael Trujillo's Dominican Republic. Reason: as chairman of the Inter-American Press Association's press freedom committee, Dubois had recommended that two Trujillo-owned dailies, El Caribe and La Nation, be expelled from the I.A.P.A., because there is no freedom of the press under Trujillo. "Mr. Dubois must consider it an honor to be denied Dominican hospitality," the Tribune applauded. "He has been penalized for possessing principles."

It was not the first time that a Latin American dictator had struck at Jules Dubois. Dubbed the "No.1 Gangster of U.S. Journalism" by Peron's kept press, Jules Dubois, 47. is a shrewd, belligerently honest reporter of the old school who has been pistol-whipped, jailed and shot at in the course of covering revolutions in ten-Latin American countries. During Costa Rica's 1948 revolt against its pro-Communist government, six Red goons worked Dubois over with rifle butts. A month later, while covering a revolution in Colombia, Dubois phoned a blow-by-blow story to the Trib from a room in Bogota's presidential palace while insurgents fought in the corridors. Later, to get his own and fellow newsmen's copy to a cable office, Dubois ran a gauntlet of machine-gun fire. "He's absolutely unafraid," says Tribune Managing Editor Don Maxwell. "He scares us with the situations he gets into."

Sacred Duty. Husky, blue-eyed Reporter Dubois, who wears unbreakable plastic spectacles as a precaution against manhandling, keeps his ears cocked for news leads by carrying a pocket radio wherever he goes. In nearly 30 years (ten for the Trib) on the banana-belt beat, he has developed an uncanny facility for guessing when and where a story will break. In Guatemala, where he reported as early as 1948 that the Arevalo regime was Communist-infiltrated, he arrived on the scene only hours before Castillo Armas' successful uprising broke out in 1954. New York-born Dubois speaks fluent Spanish and Portuguese, travels 100,000 miles a year from his base in Panama as a roving reporter and Hemisphere drumbeater for the Trib. His reporting is sometimes ponderous in the Gothic provincial style approved by the late Colonel Bertie Mc-Cormick (who discovered Dubois when he was working oh the Panama Star & Herald), but it is always authoritative and accurate. And among newsmen, Dubois' scorn for censors--and his ingenuity in outwitting them--has made him a legendary figure.

"It's a newsman's sacred duty to beat the censor," says Jules Dubois. He has used carrier pigeons, outgoing tourists and elaborately coded telephone calls to smuggle out his dispatches. He was about to be deported from Guatemala for violating censorship in the civil war when Castillo Armas entered the city. Fortunately for reporters, Castillo Armas was an old friend: he had studied under Colonel-Instructor Dubois during World War II in the U.S. Army's command and general staff school at Fort Leavenworth. Castillo Armas at once gave newsmen the run of the wires without censorship.

Truncheon for Totalitarians. Correspondent Dubois has struck his most resounding blows for unfettered reporting through the LA.P.A. press freedom committee, which he helped to organize in 1951 and has headed ever since at the insistence of fellow members. The committee investigates and documents press-government relations throughout Latin America and wields an effective public-relations truncheon by dropping from membership all newspapers that are proved to be Communist-or fascist-influenced "or have any other totalitarian tendencies."

Last week, in his annual I.A.P.A. report on press freedom, Jules Dubois complained of a governmental stranglehold on the news in five countries besides the Dominican Republic: Paraguay, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia and Colombia. "Not next year, or the year after, but some year," says Dubois, "the time may come when the association can say to a dictator or a would-be dictator: 'Stop! You've gone far'enough!'" But Dubois reports that even in countries where newspapers are basically free, even in Castillo Armas' Guatemala, attempts at suppression continue. The moment a free press fears to cry stop, he suggests, it invites new Trujillos.

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