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Frank Smyth
smyth.frank@gmail.com

Frank Smyth is the Washington representative and Journalist Security Coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. He serves as board member of the International News Safety Institute and was a former investigator for Human Rights Watch.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who writes mainly about foreign affairs. His Web site is franksmyth.com, where you can read his complete biography.

In 2000, the year Smyth joined the Committee to Protect Journalists, he also worked in Colombia for the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In 2001 Smyth wrote CPJ's investigative report on Colombian paramilitary attacks against journalists, "Bad Press."

Smyth is an alumnus of Boston College as well as the Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He was born in 1960 in New Jersey and lives now in Washington, D.C.

Contributions

Murdering with impunity: the dramatic rise in the slaying of reporters
COMMENTARY | November 21, 2010
More journalists were killed in 2009 than ever before and most were deliberately targeted. The majority of victims since 1992 have been beat reporters doing their job -- not investigative reporters or ones who died in combat. In Afghanistan, outright homicides account for 59 percent of journalists killed since 1992. In Iraq, 63 percent of journalists killed since the US-led invasion in 2003 were murdered.

When Looking at Mexico’s Drug Violence, Don’t Forget Guatemala’s Silent Mafia
ASK THIS | May 19, 2010
On May 5, the FBI and DEA together told Congress that more cocaine is being shipped through Guatemala than ever before. And among the suspected drug lords today are the same military intelligence officers who engineered massacres in Guatemala more than a quarter century ago.

Guatemala, home of powerful drug runners
ASK THIS | November 20, 2005
In an article in the Texas Observer, Frank Smyth tells how the Guatemalan military and U.S.-trained anti-narcotics police have been running drugs and committing violence with impunity for more than a decade. Here he provides some background and links on this seldom-reported story.

How soft money gets dirty in a way no one can trace
ASK THIS | August 24, 2004
Some political campaign groups play by the rules, registering their activities with the FEC, the IRS or both, writes freelance journalist Frank Smyth. Others, including ones that run vicious attack ads on TV, may skirt the law — or rely on lack of oversight by the IRS — to find ways of keeping secret the names of their contributors.