2001 – Midyear Meeting – Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil
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Peru
8 de mayo de 2013 - 20:00
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PERU
Peru has made progress in freedom of expression in recent months. The transition government of Valentín Paniagua took the necessary steps enabling Baruch Ivcher and Genaro Delgado Parker to regain control of television channels 2 and 13, respectively, which had been seized from them.
President Paniagua signed the Declaration of Chapultepec at a colegio from which the IAPA had barred President Fujimori. During the Chapultepec forum the IAPA was honored by several members of the media for its role in restoring democracy to Peru.
Since the last meeting there has emerged a campaign, as occurred under "Fujimontesinismo," as the Fujimori-Montesinos period is called, to defame the IAPA and its current president, Danilo Arbilla. It has been established, for example, that Peru's intelligence services with connections in Uruguay as well as some journalists in both countries tried to incriminate Arbilla by a number of means, including using the Internet.
On November 3 the executive branch introduced a bill that was turned into law by Congress, to regularize the status of naturalized foreigners in Peru.
On December 6 civil court judge Ricardo Tobías upheld an interim relief measure enforceable against all officers of the public administration, reinstating Ivcher's citizenship. Ivcher returned to Peru with his family on December 4, thus ending a heated legal battle between Ivcher and the channel's other minority shareholders, Samuel and Mendel Winter, who had taken over control of the station in 1997 when Ivcher was stripped of citizenship.
In the second half of February three independent dailies revealed the existence of "contracts" entered into by several members of the media with an undisclosed party (who did not sign the contract), granting authority over programming and the power to veto both interviewees and journalists. The undisclosed party was, of course, Vladimiro Montesinos, former director of the National Intelligence Service (SIN). One of these contracts had been signed by the Winter brothers, who admitted to anticorruption investigator Ana Cecilia Magallanes that they had received ten million soles and three million dollars for signing. The original documents are in the possession of the deputy prosecutor for the "Montesinista" corruption case. The Winters were arrested and are being held at the Los Cibeles barracks.
On December 7 Peruvian businessman Genaro Delgado Parker reassumed the management of Radio 1160 and the Red Global Canal 13 television station.
The judicial persecution of Radio 1160 took the form of the controversial attachment of the station's transmitter and broadcasting equipment, forcing the "Ondas de Libertad" program hosted by journalist César Hildebrandt temporarily off the air. The basis for the complaint was a debt allegedly owed to communications entrepreneur Franco de Ferrari. This state of affairs meant that Radio 1160 could only resume broadcasting under uncertain conditions.
The court orders that handed management of Red Global over to Delgado Parker's partner, Ángel Gonzáles, called for the channel to close down news and journalism programs in 1998. In November 2000 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights sent an official letter to the Peruvian government reiterating its March 2000 call for interim relief to turn management of the channel back over to Delgado Parker.
Nevertheless, in September 2000 the Property Restructuring Commission of the National Consumer Defense Institute (INDECOPI) declared Red Global bankrupt and appointed a meeting of creditors chaired by Franco de Ferrari. Even after the INDECOPI court had ruled in August that the bankruptcy declaration had been improperly filed, the bankruptcy proceedings went ahead, and the channel was seized.
On October 27 the roundtable sponsored by the OAS had approved the arrangements for turning management of the channel back over to Delgado Parker, which finally occurred on December 7 in the presence of the district attorney for Civil Section 41 of the Lima Superior Court, Margot Salinas.
Delgado Parker reassumed the management of his television channel and made a number of changes, including hiring César Hildebrandt, who resigned on camera a few weeks later after a video was made public, showing Montesinos and Delgado Parker making deals to influence the courts in cases unrelated to Canal 13 and negotiating the termination of Hildebrandt's contract.
Based on his conversation with Montesinos, Delgado Parker was charged while in Miami with obstruction of justice. A few days ago Delgado Parker returned from the United States and turned himself in, and is being held in anticipation of his court hearing.
On the basis of the videos and compromising documents, the courts issued two more international warrants for the arrest of two television station executives, father and son José Enrique and José Francisco Crousillat, the principal shareholders of broadcast channel Canal 4. That station had staunchly backed some of the dirtiest political campaigns of the 2000 general elections. Contracts similar to the ones signed by the Winters surfaced with José Francisco Crousillat's signature on them. This week, Congress released two more scandalous videos showing José Francisco Crousillat accepting nearly two million dollars as a "bonus" for the television station's services and, on another tape, the father and son accepting a million more.
In January another video showed the editor of the newspaper Expreso, Eduardo Calmell del Solar, accepting two million dollars in two suitcases and, on another tape, a million more. The first video related to the sale of stock in Cable Canal de Noticias (a member company of the same group as Expreso). The second related to the payment for "collaboration commitments" signed by Calmell as editor of Expreso. Calmell del Solar was called upon to resign from Expreso after the board of directors withdrew its confidence and sued him for the considerable damage done to the newspaper. A warrant had been out for his arrest since mid-February, but he evaded arrest before turning himself in to the authorities when the warrant was changed to house arrest, under which he remains.
A fourth television entrepreneur, Julio Vera Abad, chairman of the board of Andina de Televisión (Canal 9), is also on trial for accepting money from Montesinos. He is currently a fugitive from justice in Peru with a warrant for his arrest filed with Interpol.
On February 8 the Office of the Ombudsman introduced a bill in Congress that creates an exception to Article 374 of the Criminal Code (crime of insulting public officials) and Article 7 of Executive Order 25475 (crime of defending terrorism). The ombudsman's bill is based on the unconstitutionality of these laws and their inconsistency with freedom of expression and the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights.
In regard to the crime of insulting public officials, the bill states that "[t]he honor of public officials, like that of all citizens, shall be protected by definitions of crimes which protect the juridical right to honor." In regard to the crime of defending terrorism, the bill calls for it to be defined in terms that protect freedoms and establish aggravating circumstances.
Other affronts to freedom of the press are listed below in chronological order.
On October 2 Jaime Alemán, the attorney representing Vladimiro Montesinos in Panama, attacked reporter Mariella Patriau and photographer Adriana Navarro of the newspaper Liberación in Panama City, where they were investigating financial corruption involving the former presidential advisor.
On October 8 an unmarked helicopter similar to those used by the Air Force and Navy flew over the house of the editor of the magazine Caretas, Enrique Zileri, and hovered dangerously low over the garden for several minutes.
On October 10 Segundo Jara, a journalist and correspondent for Coordinadora Nacional de Radio (CNR) and Huánuco's Diario Regional, was wounded in the leg by a police officer who shot him directly in the thigh during a demonstration by coca-leaf growers in the Aucayacu district.
César Ascues, a journalist for the newspaper Liberación, and César Romero, political section chief for the newspaper La República, reported to the authorities that they had received death threats from unidentified individuals, warning them to halt their investigation into arms dealing by former presidential advisor Vladimiro Montesinos.
On October 16 unidentified individuals broke into the offices of Panamericana Televisión in the city of Tacna and stole editing equipment valued at 10,000 dollars. The theft occurred hours after correspondent Emilio Várgas had broadcast a report on police beatings of people not taking part in protest marches.
On October 25 José Parraguez, a journalist and host of the news radio show "Análisis" on Radio PVC, was attacked while on his way home to Nueva Cajamarca in the Department of Cajamarca by eight unknown individuals, who warned him to stop reporting on corruption.
On October 27 in Chepén, Sebastián Castro Mendoza, producer and host of the news program "Despertar Campesinos" on Canal 11 and Radio San Sebastián, was threatened with death and beaten by the president of the Association of Rice Growers and governor of the Guadalupe District, Victor Izquierdo. Castro Mendoza had repeatedly accused Izquierdo of administrative irregularities.
On November 1, the plenary session of the National Congress decided not to debate five motions on the agenda to sanction Congressman Luis Cácares Velázquez for physically and verbally abusing La República journalist Rosa Reyna.
On November 15 during a construction workers' march in Lima's city center, Willy Zárate, a press photographer for the newspaper El Tío, was attacked by a group of police who fired a tear-gas bomb at him that struck him in the hip.
On November 16 Roxana Aquino, a journalist and reporter for Radio Líder in Arequipa, was beaten and threatened by unknown individuals as she was leaving the stadium of the University of San Agustín. Aquino is investigating irregularities in the trading of a player from Arequipa's Melgar soccer club to an English team.
On November 27 Marilú Gambini, a correspondent for the newspaper Liberación in the port of Chimbote, reported to the authorities that on several occasions in August she had been the victim of scare tactics by individuals who said they were members of the police. On November 18 her two-year-old son had been kidnapped for ten hours. The child was found unharmed on her doorstep with a note that said, "Tattletale, this is only a warning."
On December 2 a fire set by persons unknown destroyed the facilities of Radio Super Continental 1480 AM in the Province of Chulucanas in Piura.
On December 12 Delia Vergara, the mayor of the District of Chaclacayo from the Vamos Vecino party, repeatedly struck Liberación press photographer Angela Talledo with a leather jacket for photographing her as she was leaving criminal court. That same afternoon Talledo was held up by an individual who pointed a revolver at her and took her camera valued at 1,500 dollars.
On January 4 a group from the Frente Patriótico de Loreto physically and verbally abused two journalists, Panamericana Televisión correspondent Raúl Herrera Soria and Nicolás Prokopiu, the producer of a police report on Radio Atlántida, as they were leaving a press conference for presidential candidate Lourdes Flores Nano. Later, the group went to Canal 6 and threatened to trash the station if it employed journalists who helped Fujimori.
On January 30 district attorney Víctor Hugo Salvatierra charged Nicolás Lúcar, a journalist and host of the "Tiempo Nuevo" program on America Televisión, with the alleged crime of insulting public officials. Two days earlier he had broadcast an in-depth interview on his program with a man claiming to have guarded Vladimiro Montesinos, who accused several public officials, including president Valentín Paniagua, of accepting bribes or committing other crimes in complicity with the fugitive former presidential advisor.
The response from Paniagua and other implicated parties was immediate, and a wave of public opinion rose against the journalist. The district attorney charged Lúcar with insulting public officials.
On February 1 journalist Iván Cubas Coronado was released after being held in the El Milagro prison. Cubas Coronado was arrested in September 2000 as he was leaving an interview with journalist Beto Ortiz on Canal A. He was charged with defamation of an officer of the La Libertad Superior Court.
Several times on the nights of February 25 and 28 members of the Frente Patriótico de Loreto again attacked the La Karibeña radio station's facilities in Loreto. Journalists at the station are unpopular, due to their open support for Fujimori. The purpose of these two attacks, however, was to force them to take down a banner and remove campaign literature for candidate Lourdes Flores Nano of Unidad Nacional, the party for which the owner of the Rocío Gonzalves building was running for Congress.
