Miami (January 23, 2013)—Threats to a team of reporters from Canal 12 television in El Salvador brought a protest today from the Inter American Press Association (IAPA), which urged the authorities to investigate, identify those responsible, bring them to justice and ensure the safety of the reporters in doing their job.
According to local media a person drove in front of the vehicle in which the reporters from the Canal 12 news program “Hechos” were traveling and pulled out a gun, pointed it at them and then drove off. The threat, captured on a video relayed on Twitter and Facebook, occurred yesterday (Tuesday) as the journalists were returning from covering a court hearing in the town of Santa Tecla, in which three defendants who last week shot and wounded another person were sentenced to imprisonment on remand.
According to the journalists the same man who threatened them had some minutes earlier warned that if they broadcast information about the legal proceedings “they would not be responsible for the lives of ‘Hechos’ cameramen and reporters.”
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, condemned the verbal threat and the one made with a pistol against the journalists and called on the authorities to “investigate promptly to determine who was legally responsible and prevent a recurrence of these acts of intimidation that affect the work of the press.”
Canal 12 director Jorge Carbajo in turn said that “we directly link the threat with the case (investigated). When they came out of the courtroom this guy overtook them and then drove into reverse and tells them that if they publish anything more about the case they will pay the consequences. This guy had been seen at the hearing.”
Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, joined a call by the El Salvador Journalists Association (APES) for immediate action by police and public prosecutors.
He also referred to the IAPA-inspired Declaration of Chapultepec, a hemisphere document on free speech and press freedom whose principle number 4 establishes that acts of violence, intimidation and lack of punishment of perpetrators “severely limit freedom of expression and of the press. Such acts must be investigated promptly and punished harshly.”
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.
