The organization calls on Guatemalan and Honduran authorities to investigate, bring guilty to justice
Miami (April 2, 2009)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today expressed outrage at the murder of journalists this week in Honduras and Guatemala, two countries plagued by an overall lack of safety, and at the same time called for swift investigations to identify the responsible parties and bring them to justice “as the only way to put a halt to this violence.”
IAPA President Enrique Santos Calderón, editor of the Bogotá, Colombia, newspaper El Tiempo, offered his sympathy to the journalists’ family members and colleagues and urged authorities in each country to determine the motives for the killings. “Prompt investigations will make it possible to determine if the journalists were murdered in revenge for their reporting and if they were done to silence information that was important to the community; this is the only way to put a halt to violence.”
One murder occurred in Guatemala City, the Guatemalan capital, yesterday. Rolando Santis, a reporter with Telecentro 13 television, was shot and killed and his cameraman, Antonio de León, was seriously wounded in an assault carried out by two men on a motorcycle. On being hit Santis lost control of his vehicle and crashed into several street vendor stalls. At night, as the news was being broadcast on his television channel, there were a number of anonymous telephone calls in which death threats were made to the announcers, warning them not to continue reporting the incident.
In another development, on Tuesday in a similar incident on a public street in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Rafael Munguía, a correspondent of Radio Cadena Voces radio network, was murdered. A band of hired killers armed with 8mm handguns shot him eight times, according to the police report. Among the theories under consideration is that it was a premeditated attack that could have been carried out in revenge for Munguía's report exposing organized crime's activities in the area. An announcer working for the same radio, Carlos Salgado, was murdered on October 18, 2007 as he was leaving the network’s headquarters in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.
For several years now the IAPA has been holding conferences and seminars on personal safety, the press and youth gangs in a number of Central American countries pointing out the dangers that the press faces in carrying out its work in environments of violence and impunity while calling for guarantees for the protection of journalists.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, Texas, declared, “It is urgent that in both Honduras and Guatemala make these acts of violence against journalists a focus of attention and a solution found to stop the incidents that have resulted in the loss of lives but could also have the added effect of journalists resorting to self-censorship.”
The IAPA said the incidents brought to 349 the number of journalists it has recorded murdered in the Americas since 1987, three of them in Honduras and 22 in Guatemala.
