Enrique Zileri, a preeminent Latin American journalist and scourge of a succession of repressive Peruvian governments during his decades at the helm of Caretas, his county’s top newsmagazine, died Aug. 24 at a hospital in Lima. He was 83.
The cause was complications from throat cancer, said his daughter Drusila Zileri.
Mr. Zileri was widely noted as a persistent advocate for press freedoms in Latin America when many regional governments sought to suppress the media. In a statement, Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian writer and Nobel laureate, called him an “indefatigable defender of freedom and democracy” whose publication “could never be bribed or intimidated.”
Caretas — the title means “Masks” — was co-founded by Mr. Zileri’s mother in 1950 and became one of the country’s most influential news outlets. Its reach was compared to that of Time or Newsweek in the United States.
Mr. Zileri was credited with combining ambitious investigative reportage with cultural features and society gossip that together helped make Caretas a weekly must-read. The magazine distinguished itself from many other Latin American publications by showing no loyalty to any particular political faction and by seeking to expose government abuses, whoever was in power.
The newspaper’s office was located in Lima across from the presidential palace, as if in a constant faceoff with authorities.
“I imagined the President peeping out from behind the palace curtains, training his binoculars on Zileri’s mischievous grin,” journalist Isabel Hilton wrote in the New Yorker in 2001.
Writing in the Nieman Reports, Gorriti described the mandate for Latin American journalists at the time as “Publish, try not to perish.”
“I was fortunate to work with a great editor — the talented and brave Enrique Zileri,” Gorriti wrote. “He… could inspire or terrify Caretas’s eclectic group of journalists with a simple, binary alternative: Produce a scoop or suffer temporal but stinging disgrace.”
During the autocratic government of Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s, Caretas aggressively investigated corruption and human rights abuses despite government efforts to stop the spread of such information.
“Enrique and Caretas were really in the vanguard of this struggle,” Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in an interview. “He was both incredibly gracious and absolutely irascible in the way that only great journalists can be.”
Vladimiro Montesinos, the chief of national security under Fujimori, once sued Mr. Zileri for defamation when Caretas described him as Fujimori’s “Rasputin.” Mr. Zileri was fined and received a suspended jail sentence.
“I think the main idea was to keep us quiet,” Mr. Zileri told the Los Angeles Times.
Enrique Alberto Zileri Gibson was born June 4, 1931, in Lima. His father, Manlio Zileri, was an Argentine diplomat of Italian descent. His mother, Doris Gibson Parra, was a Peruvian of English heritage dating back several generations.
Mr. Zileri attended boarding schools and studied at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., but did not complete his degree because his family ran out of money to finance his tuition, his daughter said.
He worked as a publicist and wrote for Caretas before becoming editor and publisher. The magazine, which continues as a family-run publication, is today led by his son Marco Zileri.
His wife of five decades, Daphne Dougall de Zileri, a noted photographer, died in 2011. Survivors include five children, Marco Zileri, Diana Zileri, Sebastian Zileri and Drusila Zileri, all of Lima, and all of whom work for Caretas, and Domenica Zileri of Tyler, Tex.; and eight grandchildren.
Mr. Gibson received many honors, including the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot prize for journalism that furthers inter-American understanding. He later helped administer the prize as a juror.
“It’s not an exaggeration — he was one of the giants of Latin American journalism,” said John Dinges, a veteran foreign correspondent in the region and a professor at the Columbia University’s journalism school.
Among U.S. journalists, Mr. Zileri was a go-to source for explanations of his country’s politics. Like the journalism his magazine produced, his quips often were insightful and stylish. Before the 1990 Peruvian election, in which Vargas Llosa would lose his presidential bid to Fujimori, Mr. Zileri weighed in with his estimation of the writer’s prospects.
“You have to be willing to step on your mother,” Mr. Zileri told the New York Times, “and I’m not sure that he is.”
*Originally published in ‘The Washington Post’.
