He signs the Declaration of Chapultepec
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (February 16, 2012)—The president of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, added his signature to the Declaration of Chapultepec during a meeting yesterday at the government headquarters here, also taking part in which was the president of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), Milton Coleman.
During the event Coleman, senior editor of The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., gave a summary of the state of press freedom in the Western Hemisphere, putting special emphasis on those countries where it is not respected, and invited President Funes to sign the Declaration of Chapultepec, getting his immediate agreement to do so, thus endorsing the hemisphere document containing 10 fundamental principles on freedom of expression and of the press.
“In El Salvador we have full press freedom and there is no like situation, as you well indicate, that exists in such countries as Nicaragua, Ecuador, Venezuela or Argentina. That is why I have no problem as a journalist and as president to endorse it,” Funes said on becoming the 61st president of a nation in the Americas to ratify the document.
For his part, the IAPA president acknowledged the role that Funes had played in making defamation and libel no longer criminal offenses, and also praised his efforts to establish an institution that draws up regulations to govern the Law on Access to Public Information, enacted in El Salvador last year.
The Declaration of Chapultepec was drafted in March 1994 at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City, Mexico, following the holding of the Hemisphere Conference on Press Freedom in which political leaders, intellectuals, journalists and members of the public endorsed the document.
Accompanying Coleman at the signing ceremony in San Salvador were Salvadoran newspaper publishers José Roberto Dutriz of La Prensa Gráfica and Fabricio Altamirano of El Diario de Hoy, IAPA Executive Director Julio E. Muñoz and the organization’s Development Director, Viviana Bianchi.
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. For more information please go to http://www.sipiapa.org.
