The Inter-American Press Association (IAPA) on Wednesday condemned the “alarming” attacks on journalists recorded this month in Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras, and announced that the lack of protection for communication professionals in Latin America will be one of the main themes of its next half-year meeting.
“All violence against the press must be interpreted as a direct affront to the public's right to be informed,” the president of the IAPA's Commission on Freedom of the Press and Information, Carlos Jornet, said in a statement.
For the journalistic director of the Argentine newspaper La Voz del Interior, “it is urgent that these attacks be repelled and taken very seriously by governments and civil organizations, especially in the case of Mexico, where eight journalists were killed in the first quarter of 2022.”
In today's statement, the IAPA echoed the murder of journalist Orlando Villanueva in Puerto Barrios (Guatemala), on March 8, and other acts of violence in which journalists from Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras fell victim.
Villanueva had reported acts of corruption and poor performance by municipal authorities on his digital page Noticias del Puerto and, shortly before his death, informed the Public Prosecutor's Office that he was being harassed and being persecuted.
The IAPA also mentions the case of journalists from the Mexican newspaper El Universal who were threatened when they interviewed residents of San Pablo Tecalco, Tecámac, in the State of Mexico.
Five subjects, some wearing vests bearing the State Police badge, called two journalists and a newspaper photographer and an environmental protection activist to suspend their work and erase images and threatened to burn them alive if they returned to the scene.
The journalists collected testimonies of the denunciations of the inhabitants of San Pablo Tecalco about the extraction of materials from a hill that would be used for the construction of the new international airport.
In El Salvador, on March 29, a photographer from the newspaper El Diario de Hoy was attacked by soldiers who forced him to kneel and erase images from his camera.
During the first days of the curfew, decreed on Sunday due to the increase in gang violence, other journalists denounced that the military and police are preventing them from doing their work.
In Honduras, the newspaper El Heraldo denounced death threats, intimidation and a smear campaign on social networks against journalist Yony David Bustillo Centeno, allegedly coming from Fire Department personnel.
The journalist has been investigating acts of corruption and lack of transparency in that institution.
According to the IAPA's Chapultepec Index, Guatemala, Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras have been reproving violence and impunity over the past two years, one of the four dimensions that the tool uses to measure the level of press freedom in a society.
The IAPA, a non-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of press freedom based in Miami, Florida, will hold its half-year meeting virtually from April 19-21.
(With information from EFE)
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