Press: The Treacherous Lure of a Story

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On a Honduran border road, two U.S. journalists are killed

The gravel road from Cifuentes to Las Trojes is a pleasant, ordinary scribble between mountains at roadside and a green valley. Peasants pick their way as rickety trucks rumble by. The main thing to interest a foreign visitor on the stretch, a four-hour drive southeast of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, is that the border with Nicaragua is as little as 20 or 30 yards away. There is a sporadic, undeclared war between the two countries; the proximity can mean "action"—gunfire. Last week that promise of a story drew Reporter Dial Torgerson, 55, of the Los Angeles Times, and Freelance Photographer Richard Cross, 33, on assignment for U.S. News & World Report, to their deaths.

Tuesday midafternoon the journalists headed back to Tegucigalpa from Las Trojes, where they had been checking on firing by Nicaraguan troops into Honduras to harass contra insurgents. Just after the two men's rented car, a white Toyota, passed Honduran Truckdriver Jose Cruz Espinal, he saw a grenade split the car almost in half; then machine-gun fire spattered the road. The shots came from terrain held by Nicaragua's Sandinista government. The killings could hardly have been an accident: the men were almost certainly identifiable as civilians; the attackers probably shot from no more than 150 to 300 yards away. An American journalist who had been in Sandinista encampments in recent weeks had witnessed a soldier firing a cannon at the same stretch of road. When asked why, the soldier said, "A vehicle was passing by."

The deaths—the eleventh and twelfth of foreign journalists in Central America since 1979, but the first in more than a year—sent alternating eddies of lament and reminiscence through the men's colleagues. At the Hotel Maya in Tegucigalpa, and at the Hotel Camino Real in El Salvador's capital, San Salvador, some reporters halfheartedly second-guessed the fatal venture, as if to suggest it need not have happened. The road was known to be dangerous, they argued: two British journalists had been fired on in separate incidents in the previous few days; in his final week Cross had twice survived gunfire along the same stretch. But the critics soon acknowledged that they too would probably have headed along the road in any circumstance short of pitched battle and that men with cameras would take the utmost risks to get close to the action. Said Miami Herald Photographer Murry Sill: "It is like being in a meteor shower—you stand in it and gaze up in awe and try to stay out of its way." Added CBS Correspondent George Natanson: "If you do not want to take chances, you go into public relations."

Fifty foreign correspondents in Mexico City held a vigil of commemoration and rather wistfully urged greater safety for reporters. But journalists conceded that in battle, caution may matter less than fate. The war-hardened correspondents' judgment on their slain peers: Torgerson and Cross had run out of luck. (Indeed, only chance limited the deaths to two: Stringers Susan Morgan of London's Economist and Marcia Johnson of ABC and the Los Angeles Times, dropped out of the trip.)