MIAMI, Florida (April 26, 2002)–Hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers throughout the Americas were invited today by the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) to sign a letter addressed to the president of Honduras, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, asking him to set up legal mechanisms enabling violence unleashed against journalists and the impunity surrounding such offenses to be confronted and ended.
Since the beginning of last month to date six journalists have been murdered in various parts of the Central American country, setting off a wave of violence— José Hernández (killed on March 1), David Meza (March 11), Nahúm Palacios (March 14), José Bayardo Mairena and Manuel Juárez (March 26), and Georgino Orellano (April 20), without any positive result in the police investigations being known.
The international community signs a letter published by the IAPA in nearly 400 newspapers around the Western Hemisphere in which the Honduran government is called on to put an end to the reigning climate of terror and to identify and apply the full weight of the law to the guilty.
“We take the liberty of calling your attention to these cases, urging you please to instruct your country’s relevant authorities not to cease their respective investigations and not to allow these murders to go unpunished,” the letter adds.
The IAPA is waging a hemisphere-wide campaign titled “Let’s Put an End to Impunity” so that more than 380 crimes committed against journalists – and the disappearances of a dozen others – in the last 22 years may not remain unpunished. The initiative is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Readers wishing to join the campaign by adding their signature to the letter may do so on the Web site www.impunidad.com
