Miami (October 30, 2012)—An incendiary bomb attack on a Bolivian radio station and a journalist and a camerawoman there as they were broadcasting an interview in which there were allegations of corruption brought a sharp condemnation today by the Inter American Press Association (IAPA).
Fernando Vidal, the owner and director of the station, Radio Popular 95.1 FM in the town of Yacuiba, and producer Karen Arce, were attacked yesterday morning by four masked assailants who broke into the radio station and hurled Molotov cocktails that seriously burned them. The station’s equipment was destroyed.
The attack, heard by radio listeners as it was occurring, came as Vidal was interviewing two women who spoke of alleged smuggling in Yacuiba, a town in southern Bolivia on the border with Argentina.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, expressed his solidarity with colleagues and family members of the two attack victims and joined with Bolivia’s National Press Association (ANP) in hoping that the official investigations would result in those responsible being taken to court and punished.
The police announced the arrest of three of the four suspects, while local media and the ANP recalled that in 2008 there had also been an attack with explosive devices on the plant of a television channel in Yacuiba that had to date not been solved.
Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, called this latest attack “an act of extreme cruelty and far removed from the elemental principles of press freedom and tolerance, so it requires immediate action by the authorities to identify those responsible and bring them to court.”
Due to the seriousness of the burns to his face, hands and body Vidal, 78, was rushed to the city of Santa Cruz, where he remains hospitalized. A colleague of his confirmed that he had recently been threatened over his denunciations. For her part, Arce, 25, is now under intensive care due to the burns she received to the head and face, local media reported.
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.
