Latin American online media join successful IAPA campaign

In a new stage in the IAPA’s hemisphere-wide campaign to end impunity surrounding the murder of journalists online news media of Latin America have begun to publish ads calling for punishment of those responsible for such deaths. The IAPA has been distributing the ads in recent days to newspapers belonging to the respective national press associations – organizations that have also joined the initiative, among them Adepa, Adira, Andiarios, ANP, Aedep, Peruvian Press Council, Venezuelan Press Bloc, AME and AEE. The campaign calls on the newspapers’ readers to go to the Web site www.impunidad.com and add their signatures to a letter that each month is sent to the president of a nation where a crime committed against a journalist has continued to go unpunished. In this way the campaign has spread to every corner of the region. The ad is now appearing on the front pages of the online editions of such newspapers as La Opinión Austral of Rio Gallegos in the far south of Argentina; Hoy, on the equator in Quito, Ecuador; El Meridiano of Sucre in Colombia; El Día of La Plata, Argentina, and Tico Times in San José, Costa Rica – to name just a few. The national associations have also offered to publish the ad on their Web sites. That is how it now appears on that of Bolivia’s National Press Association and as a news item on the main page of that of Colombia’s Andiarios.