|
Since our last report the committee has continued its watch -- and continued to speak out -- on behalf of our Latin American colleagues. Their situation, which seemed to be bending toward unfettered freedom of expression just a few years ago, now continues to deteriorate from Mexico to Peru.
It was just twelve months ago that Peru's government announced that crimes against journalists would be formally encoded in Peruvian law. Notwithstanding the new law, attacks on the media increased in 2007. The awful trend has continued in 2008. Consider a single day last month -- Wednesday, May 14:
Sandro Salcedo Domínguez, director and host of Radio Santa Mónica's Tribuna del Pueblo, was beaten and threatened with death by Néstor Candia Torres, a football player for the Cusco team Cienzano, over a comment the journalist made about a theft that took place at the club's headquarters. Candia was alleged to have been involved in the theft. The football player and two other men blocked Domínguez’s way, beat him and threatened to kill him if he mentioned the topic on his program again.
Mabel Cáceres, editor of El Búho, received an envelope with a death threat from an anonymous source. The incident took place in the Arequipa region. The note referred to aggressive reporting in El Búho on Arequipa 's former regional president, Daniel Vera Ballón, a prominent member of the Partido Aprista Peruano political party. Cáceres believes the threat she received is related to the publication of these allegations.
Cáceres’s colleague at El Búho, José Luis Márquez Villalobos, was assaulted by Jhon Bustinza Maydana and his wife, Yolanda Becerra, after Márquez asked about their involvement in a bid for a contract at the San Agustín National University. Bustinza hit the journalist and destroyed his camera. Police took the assailants and the journalist to Santa Martha, where a group of reporters gathered to cover the event. According to the journalists, Sheriff Francis Alarcón Gallegos threw them out, physically attacking La República reporter, Christian Ticona Coaguilla, for good measure.
As we wrote in a letter to President Alan Garcia Perez, in the past threats attributed to the Shining Path guerrilla movement added to the climate of hostility towards Peruvian media fed by local politicians and police. With Shining Path now sidelined, Peruvian journalists remain in some ways scapegoats for a society still recovering from the “people’s war” of the Shining Path and the abusive regime of former President Alberto Fujimori (now on trial for the unjustified imprisonment of a journalist in 1992).
In Bolivia, meanwhile, tension has been building all spring. On March 27, at least 150 protesters rallied outside the government building in Pucarani, calling for the removal of Mayor Alejandro Mamani. The protesters forced their way into the municipal building and broke down the door to Radio Municipal, destroyed station equipment and fatally beat reporter, Carlos Quispe Quispe. On May 3, the day before the much-discussed autonomy referendum in the department of Santa Cruz , photographer, Miguel Carrasco, of La Razón was attacked in Yapacaní while covering a demonstration by migrants from the Altiplano opposed to the autonomy proposal. On May 4, three journalists were injured and a fire started by protesters damaged a TV station in the La Paz suburb of El Alto. That same day, reporter, Maritza Roca Bruno, of Radio Marítima was outside the International Press Centre in Santa Cruz for the referendum when she was attacked by five people, including a central-government official, Homero Amorín, after she found them in a truck laden with ballots.
In an exchange with President Juan Evo Morales Ayma, the OPC expressed outrage, not just that such events could take place in a democracy, but that they could happen without police intervention.
In the past several weeks, we also renewed our correspondence with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela -- following the assassination in Caracas of Pierre Fould Gerges, vice president of Reporte de la Economia. Gerges was shot dead while driving a car belonging to his brother, the newspaper’s president. There is compelling evidence that Gerges’s murder was a case of mistaken identity. His brother has been receiving death threats ever since Reporte de la Economia began publishing articles alleging corruption among prominent financial figures in Venezuela.
Conditions for Philippine journalists, meanwhile, continue to worsen. In a letter to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, we joined the Committee to Protect Journalists in asking that the Chief Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court investigate a recent ruling by the Cebu Court of Appeals indefinitely suspending the trial of two suspects in the 2005 killing of journalist, Marlene Garcia-Esperat. Esperat, an outspoken anti-corruption columnist for Midland Review, was shot dead in front of her daughter at her home in Tacurong, on the southern island of Mindanao . She had several times accused the suspects, Osmeña Montañer and Estrella Sabay, of corruption, and they have been accused of plotting her murder. We joined with CPJ in arguing that the prosecution of this case is crucial to breaking the culture of impunity surrounding the killing of journalists in the Philippines, and to re-affirming the Philippine judiciary's constitutional commitment to uphold and defend press freedom.
In Zimbabwe meanwhile, even as the quest for honest elections fell apart, we strenuously protested President Robert Mugabe’s systematic suppression of the press since the first try at elections last March. By keeping out foreign correspondents, we told Mugabe, and by arresting and beating Zimbabwe journalists, the government apparently thinks it can conceal the truth of what is happening in the country. The unintended consequence, we contended, was to highlight a once flourishing nation’s condition of desperation.
We were heartened, therefore, by a post to the OPC’s Web site press-freedom forum by Wilf Mbanga, founder of The Zimbabwean newspaper. In May, eight men armed with assault rifles intercepted a truck carrying 60,000 copies of The Zimbabwean on Sundays, burned it so that all the newspapers were destroyed and beat the two men driving the truck. In response to our letter to Mugabe, Mbnanga wrote:
Thank you so much for this. We so appreciate your adding your voice to ours. Please note that our truck was also completely destroyed by the fire. Not only the newspapers. Such a loss. But of course nothing compared to the lives that have been lost and maimed. Please continue to make a noise. The pen is mightier than the sword.
Kind regards,
Wilf Mbanga
|
