By James Anderson, Associated Press

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) --- Despite some advances in protecting press freedoms, reporting in the Americas remains a dangerous and often deadly profession, the region's leading press group said Sunday.

In recent months, journalists have been murdered in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, expelled from Cuba and recipients of death threats in Argentina, according to delegates of the Inter American Press Association.

IAPA president Oliver F. Clarke noted 12 journalists were killed in the Western Hemisphere since October, and 191 in the past decade.

"The position in the hemisphere is quite tragic,'' Clarke, chairman of The Gleaner Co. of Jamaica, told IAPA's semi-annual meeting in San Juan.

There is cause for concern in the United States as well, delegates were told by guest speaker and White House communications adviser Sidney Blumenthal.

The former Washington Post and New Yorker journalist suggested that independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr's attempt to investigate whether the White House tried to discredit his probe with leaks to the media was a "trampling'' of the First Amendment.

Blumenthal, who was summoned by Starr's panel to appear before a grand jury, said he divulged his media contacts on the Monica Lewinsky case, but was "appalled'' to be required to do so. He urged U.S. journalists "to make our country an example to the world so that we can work as an example on behalf of freedom of the press elsewhere.''

But Jack Fuller, president of the Tribune Publishing Co., said IAPA shouldn't concern itself with relations between prosecutors and the government, because protecting the media was "a job big enough.''

IAPA delegates reported that since October, five journalists were murdered in Colombia, four in Brazil and two in Mexico. Journalists in several nations were targets of death threats, kidnappings and harassment.

There have been some advances, thanks largely to pressure from journalists' associations, said Danilo Arbilla, chairman of IAPA's press freedom committee and editor of Uruguay's Busqueda newspaper.

In Venezuela, the Supreme Court is considering throwing out a law requiring licensing of journalists, and Latin American presidents recently criticized a Venezuelan government-sponsored ethics code for journalists.

The Inter-American Human Rights Court of the Organization of American States found that the Guatemalan government was implicated in the 1985 slaying of U.S. reporter Nicholas Chapman Blake by civilian patrols.

But all too many killings of journalists have gone unsolved, IAPA delegates said. Among them is the Jan. 25, 1997, slaying of Jose Luis Cabezas, an Argentine photographer who was shot and burned while looking into suspected government corruption.

The killers of all five slain Colombian journalists remain at large.

Cuba's communist government relaxed some press controls during Pope John Paul II's visit in January, such as allowing televised broadcasts of the pontiff's Masses. But Arbilla said that Cuba's "persecution of independent journalists'' was unrelenting.

One of them, Raul Rivero, director of the CubaPress news agency, has had his telephone line in Havana blocked since he was named a regional vice chairman of IAPA's press freedom committee.

Rivero sent a taped message vowing to continue his work. "There are no free societies without freedom of the press,'' he said.

Three independent journalists have been expelled from Cuba; others were subject to arbitrary arrest and harassment. IAPA also noted that Cuba denied visas to 80 foreign reporters seeking to cover the pope's visit.