Miami (September 12, 2011)—The Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today expressed concern at the murder on Thursday last week of another journalist in Honduras and renewed its call on officials in the Central American country to investigate promptly to determine the motives and bring those responsible to justice.
Medardo Flores, 62, a reporter with Radio Uno radio station in San Pedro Sula, was murdered in the evening of Thursday, September 8 by hitmen who ambushed him in a Puerto Cortés neighborhood, 190 miles north of the Honduras capital of Tegucigalpa, and shot him nine times. Flores was also financial chief in the northern region of the country of the Frente Amplio de Resistencia Popular (FARP – People’s Resistance Front) party of former president Manuel Zelaya and was studying to be a radio announcer at a local college.
IAPA President Gonzalo Marroquín, president of the Guatemala City, Guatemala, newspaper Siglo 21, condemned the murder and urged the Honduran authorities to “make greater effort to protect the work of journalists and show real results in the investigations,” an allusion to the international support that President Porfirio Lobo’s government has had from specialists in the United States, Colombia and Spain to help solve the murders of journalists.
The Flores murder was the fifth so far this year in Honduras, one of the most dangerous countries to be a journalist. The other newsmen killed in 2011 were Nery Jeremías Orellana, Adán Benítez, Luis Mendoza and Héctor Francisco Medina Polanco.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, Texas, expressed concern, declaring, “we have to keep on vehemently denouncing and also urging the authorities to solve once and for all each of the other still unpunished murders committed since 2007.”
To date, 25 news men and women have been killed in 10 countries in the Americas (Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela) and the whereabouts of another journalist in Mexico remain unknown. In none of these cases have the official investigations determined the motives for the crimes.
The IAPA is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the defense and promotion of freedom of the press and of expression in the Americas. It is made up of more than 1,300 print publications from throughout the Western Hemisphere and is based in Miami, Florida. The IAPA Impunity Project is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and has the mission of combating violence against journalists and lessening the impunity surrounding the majority of such crimes. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org; http://www.impunidad.com