Guatemala

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During this period there have continued to be risks in the interior of the country against journalists and media where drug trafficking groups like Los Zetas of Mexico operate with threats to correspondents and reporters from small radio and television media located in some departments that show high levels of corruption. Journalist Yansi Roberto Ordóñez Galdámez was murdered on May 29. He was the host of a news program and also of a children’s program on channel 14 in the department of Escuintla. Family members said that he had been extorted and threatened. In spite of the fact that general elections have been held, the work of journalists and the media has been carried on normally, although not immune to pressures from political groups, but without any of these pressures putting freedom of the press in danger. Some aggression has taken place against communicators from municipal centers on the part of officials who have sought reelection and who had been accused of corruption. The law on access to information in Guatemala, focused on access to information by the population, has been distorted by some public servants who have used it to delay giving information to the press, which by national law has access to sources of information without prior request. It is also the case that the largest cities in the country show the greatest acts of corruption, such as Guatemala City, whose mayor is Álvaro Arzu, former president of the country, who maintains constant confrontation with the press, but with the total support of television by the Mexican Ángel González. The government of President Álvaro Colom has continued its policy of using official advertising to reward or punish media that favor or criticize it. Evidence of that is that the government’s advertising budget is mostly assigned to the television monopoly of Ángel González. Newspapers have been almost entirely excluded from government advertising, with less than 5% of such spending. It must be stressed that the candidates who are running for the presidency of the Republic have been publically committed to freedom of the press. Otto Pérez Molina and Manual Baldizón, who will dispute the vote in the elections to be held next November 6, have reaffirmed before press associations and to the media themselves in meetings in the newsrooms that they will maintain unrestricted respect for freedom to express one’s thoughts and freedom of the press, stressing the value of the roll of the media as one of the pillars of the democratic system. The director of the newspaper El Periódico, José Rubén Zamora, announced that he had been the victim of threats after revealing the business of groups dedicated to drug trafficking. He also reported that those groups have tried to bribe workers and judges so that they will arrest him with the intention of silencing his investigations.

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