IMPUNITY MURDERS AND DISAPPEARANCES

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WHEREAS in Mexico the following journalists have been killed: Luis Emmanuel Ruiz Carrillo, an independent cameraman in Monclova, Coahuila, abducted and killed in Monterrey, Nuevo León, on March 24, 2011; Rodolfo Ochoa Moreno, technical engineer for the Multimedios Group in Torreón, Coahuila, on February 10, 2011; and Carlos Alberto Guajardo, a reporter for the newspaper Expreso in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on November 5, 2010; and since March 8 Nicolás López Olguín, a contributor to the weeklies Horizonte and Noticias de Acayucan and the newspaper La Verdad in Veracruz, has been missing; WHEREAS Henry Suazo was murdered in Honduras on December 28, 2010; he was a correspondent for radio broadcaster HRN in San Juan Pueblo and a host on the Cablevision del Atlántico cable channel in La Masica, department of Atlántida; WHEREAS Merardo Moreno was murdered in Paraguay on March 3, 2011; he was an announcer on La Voz de Itakyry radio in Itakyry, Alto Paraná; WHEREAS although preliminary inquiries in Mexico would suggest that the following murders did not occur for professional motives: José Luis Cerda Meléndez, host of the program “El Club” on Televisa in Monterrey, Nuevo León on March 24, 2011; and Maribel Hernández Vela, distributor of the newspapers El Diario de Juárez and El Verpertino PM, in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua on February 2; nonetheless, the lack of effective official investigations feeds doubt on the possible motivation for the crimes because of their work with the media; WHEREAS Principle 4 of the Declaration of Chapultepec states: “Freedom of expression and of the press are severely limited by murder, terrorism, kidnapping, intimidation, the unjust imprisonment of journalists, the destruction of facilities, violence of any kind and impunity for perpetrators. Such acts must be investigated promptly and punished harshly”; THE MID-YEAR MEETING OF THE IAPA RESOLVES: to ask the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Attention to Crimes against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) in Mexico to take under its jurisdiction the cases of Luis Emmanuel Ruiz Carrillo (Nuevo León), Rodolfo Ochoa Moreno (Coahuila), Carlos Alberto Guajardo (Tamaulipas), and Nicolás López Olguín (Veracruz) and to demand the Prosecutor’s Offices of those states to seek out and try those responsible; to demand competent authorities in Honduras to investigate fully the murder of Henry Suazo (Atlántida) to determine motives and bring the responsible parties to justice; to call on investigative agencies in Paraguay to investigate and mete out justice for the murder of Merardo Moreno (Alto Paraná); to ask authorities in Mexico to investigate the motives for the homicides of José Luis Cerda Meléndez (Nuevo León) and of Maribel Hernández Vela (Chihuahua), in order to determine whether the murders occurred for reasons of their exercising their profession, and to punish those responsible.

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