Venezuelan journalist flees threat

In the prime working years of her life, Mary Ramirez is cleaning houses, pulling weeds and tending gardens for $15 an hour. It's a different life than the one she planned and started as a journalist in her native Venezuela, but she can sleep better at nights and walk the streets without having a gun held to her head.

That's worth the trade. At 27, she is starting over.

In America, the worst thing journalists have to worry about, other than a tanking industry, is a grumpy editor or having to interview cranks like Bobby Knight and Dick Cheney. Mary was told about those things in journalism school, but nobody said anything about flying bullets and threats on her life.

Mary quit the job she loves and came to America and Utah nearly a year ago to escape the near-anarchy of her homeland. "I couldn't do it anymore," she says. Instead of standing in front of a camera and talking into a microphone, she vacuums floors and dusts furniture.

After graduating from a private college with a degree in journalism, Mary immersed herself in the profession for three years, reporting simultaneously for TV and radio stations and a newspaper. She worked long hours, sometimes from morning until midnight. "I loved it," she says. "I didn't care if I had to work all day." It paid off. She won several regional awards for her reporting.

Her career was off to a fast start, but there were problems. The political climate made it difficult and dangerous to do her job.

"You cannot report what is true without putting your life at risk from the government," says Mary.

She witnessed the police attack citizens — women and children included — during a ceremony for public housing and watched in dismay as the governor fled the scene and did nothing to stop the violence. She returned to her office and began to work on her story; her boss got wind of it and told her the governor had called about her potential news report and to back off.

"I was writing what really happened," she says. "We were supposed to support the government, but I didn't." The newspaper and TV station refused to run her story. She threatened to quit, but she was convinced to remain.

On another occasion she was following the governor one night at a political event when she saw him exit his car "with white stuff on his nose. My camera guy told me, 'Don't get too close.' I didn't care. I went to him anyway and asked for an interview. He was acting weird. He was doing drugs. I was so disappointed. A lot of the political leaders do drugs. I know this."