Blogger believed to have been killed in Mexico
SANTIAGO, Chile (October 17, 2014)—At the opening of the 70th General Assembly of the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) today the organization expressed condemnation and repudiation of the murder of Paraguayan journalist Pablo Medina and called on the government of the South American country to conduct a speedy and exhaustive investigation to determine the motives of the crime and punish those responsible.
Medina, 53, correspondent of ABC Color in Curuguaty, Canindeyú province, was killed yesterday (October 16). He was driving back from carrying out a coverage when he was intercepted and attacked by two men wearing camouflage who shot him at close range several times. We was accompanied by his assistant, Antonia Almada, 19, who died later from her wounds, and another woman, identified as a local peasant leader, who was uninjured.
Medina had received threats for his reports about drug trafficking, corruption, smuggling of wood and deforestation in the area. He constantly had police protection and was used to wearing a bulletproof vest. A brother of his, Salvador, a reporter with community radio station FM Ñemity, who also denounced the smuggling of wood, was murdered on January 5, 2001.
The chairman of the IAPA’s Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, Claudio Paolillo, offered his condolences to Medina’s family and colleagues and of his assistant and expressed “the organization’s most energetic condemnation of this crime which puts in mourning the start of our deliberations, precisely which have as their objective reviewing how press freedom and the work of journalists is exercised in our countries.”
Paolillo, editor of the Montevideo, Uruguay, weekly Búsqueda, added, “The murder of Medina and that of 10 other journalists in the Americas since April this year reminds us of the importance of strongly raising our voices to demand justice in such crimes and call for guarantees for the safety and protection of members of the press while covering the news.”
Medina’s murder brought to three the number of journalists killed this year in Paraguay. On June 19 murdered was Édgar Fernández, a reporter with Radio Belén Comunicaciones in Concepción, and on May 16 Fausto Gabriel Alcaraz, host of the program “De frente a la mañana” (In The Morning) on Radio Amambay in Pedro Juan Caballero, Amambay province.
“This situation of violence shows the need to urgently carry out exhaustive investigations to determine the motives of the crimes and apply the legal tools to punish the perpetrators and masterminds,” Paolillo said after also referring to journalists and stringers murdered in the Americas since April – three in Honduras, two in Mexico and one each in Colombia, El Salvador and Peru.
In 2010 Medina was interviewed by investigative reporter Clarinha Glock of the IAPA’s Rapid Response Unit in Brazil, on news coverage in areas of risk, especially in the triple border area of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and on the murder of his brother Salvador, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q296Cf9B4Hs
Mexico
At the same time the IAPA also denounced the fact that in the city of Reynosa in Tamaulipas state there was kidnapped yesterday online activist María del Rosario Fuentes Rubio, believed to have then been murdered by members of organized crime. This crime would be added to at least two more occurring in previous years in the same state and a strategy put in practice by drug cartels to raise fear among the people so as to discourage denunciations and civil actions.
Fuentes Rubio, a stringer for the violence denunciation Web site Valor por Tamaulipas, used the Twitter account @Miut3 since 2010 and was a doctor at a local hospital where she had attended to a member of the family of a drug trafficker who had deteriorated. Several hours later a commando arrived at the hospital and kidnapped Rubio, another doctor and a nurse.
On discovering that she was a crusader on Twitter concerning the situation of violence at the hospital the kidnappers used the doctor’s Twitter account to publish a photo in which she appears alive and a second one in which she is shown as dead, along with warnings to other activists. The account was shut down.
Members of the Valor por Tamaulipas site confirmed the murder but the authorities have not yet done so. Apparently the other doctor was understood to have been freed and the whereabouts of the nurse who was also kidnapped are unknown.
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.
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.