Peruvian journalist Zileri dead at 83

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Enrique Zileri, who as longtime director of Peru's leading newsmagazine defied despotism and battled corruption with stubborn independence, died Monday at age 83.

The Caretas magazine under Zileri was highly critical of the dictatorships that have afflicted modern Peru, Nobel literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa said in a statement, calling him an "indefatigable defender of freedom and democracy" whose weekly "could never be bribed or intimidated."

Zileri succumbed to complications from throat cancer, his daughter, Drusila, said. Her brother Marco took over as Caretas' editor in 2007, while she works principally for the weekly magazine's society-focused sister publication, "Ellos y Ellas."

Younger Peruvians remember Zileri for fashioning Caretas as a standard-bearer of press freedom in the 1990s as then-President Alberto Fujimori, now imprisoned, put fierce pressure on media independence.

Maintaining that line, said Drusila Zileri, could be "solitary and quixotic."

Her father's most epic battles were against military dictator Gen. Juan Velasco, whose government deported him twice — in 1969 to Portugal and in 1975 to Argentina.

The magazine was shut down a total of eight times, she said. It was founded by her paternal grandmother, Doris Gibson, in the 1950s. Her father took over the following decade.

A member of the Inter American Press Association, Zileri was president of the International Press Institute from 1988 to 1990.

He was a 1975 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot Award from Columbia University, for excellence in coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean, and later served as a judge on the committee that determines its annual winners.