It calls for investigation into detention of journalists in another incident
Miami (August 22, 2012)—Announcement by the government of Bolivia that it is taking criminal proceedings out against the national news agency Agencia de Noticias Fides (ANF) for alleged libel of President Evo Morales today raised the concern of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA).
Government Minister Carlos Romero announced on August 17 that he would be filing a “criminal charge” against the ANF for libeling Morales in an article headlined “Evo says that if people go hungry in the east it is because of ‘laziness’,” included in a box accompanying the agency’s main report on a speech by the president on August 15. Romero said that the lawsuit seeks “to set a precedent.”
For her part, Communication Minister Amanda Dávila publicly accused the ANF of “having in a systematic manner distorted statements of the authorities” and she called the agency’s article “malicious, tendentious and provocative.”
The accusation was rejected by the ANF, founded in 1963 by its current director, Jesuit priest José Gramunt de Moragas. The ANF said that before it distributed the article in question at least two television channels broadcast extracts of the speech, in turn taken up on the social media Twitter.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Gustavo Mohme, said, “What the two government officials say against the news agency is misguided, worrisome and more like acts of intimidation.”
Mohme, editor of the Lima, Peru, newspaper La República, mentioned precepts contained in the Declaration of Chapultepec which say that no news media outlet or journalist should be penalized for telling the truth.
During his speech Morales said that in the eastern part of Bolivia, “where there is year-round production”, nevertheless “just for being lazy we can go hungry … while in the Altiplano (high plains in the west), where it is more difficult to produce because of the rains there, it is different”
Concerning another incident reported in Bolivia last weekend the IAPA expressed concern and asked the authorities to investigate what had occurred and punish those responsible for the detention of reporter Jimmy Arias and cameraman Johnny Callapa, from the state-owned television channel Bolivia TV de Cochabamba, in the town of Santa Clara.
The two arrived in the area on August 18 to cover a consultation with local residents – belonging to the communities of the Indigenous Territory and the Isiboro Sécure National Park – on construction of an interstate highway.
With the aid of some people there the journalists managed to flee their captors, who according to Arias belonged to other communities opposed to agreement to the highway. They were rescued on Monday night (August 20).
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.
