Miami (December 24, 2009)–The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today protested a three-day suspension imposed yesterday by Ecuador’s Telecommunications Agency (Suptel) on Teleamazonas, calling it an “announced reprisal” against the television station which had been subjected to government harassment through repeated administrative proceedings.
In a resolution dated December 21 Suptel ordered Teleamazonas not to broadcast for 72 hours for having aired on May 22 this year a news item based on “suppositions concerning gas exploration on Puna Island being of concern to inhabitants there, as 90% of them live off fishing.” The government said the report was false, with President Rafael Correa refuting it and using the opportunity to label news media as “destabilizing conspirators” who seek to “damage the government” and then announce that legal action would be taken to put an end to the “corrupt press.”
IAPA President Alejandro Aguirre, managing editor of the Miami, Florida, Spanish-language newspaper Diario Las Américas, said the suspension “is clearly an act of announced reprisal” and deplored the fact that we continue being witness to harassment, penalties and threats of closure of news media outlets “whose only sin is to disagree with government information and to give their version of the facts.” He also stressed that “both citizens and the media have the right to express their disagreements with government policies.”
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, Texas, added that “this administrative action is a small demonstration of the instrument that the government is sponsoring through the Communication Law, which could amount to a permanent threat of censorship.”
The IAPA has protested the constant hounding of Teleamazonas, including the time that President Correa during his weekly radio address ordered closure of the station for having broadcast an audio recording in which he negotiated changes to the now-adopted Constitution. Teleamazonas had already been penalized twice recently and this time it could result in a longer shutdown.
In October an IAPA international delegation went to the Ecuadorean capital, Quito, and met with local authorities to discuss aspects of the bill for the Communication Law that is currently being debated in the National Assembly and the tense relations between the federal government and news media.
