El Salvador

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IAPA Midyear Meeting 2017

Antigua Guatemala, Guatemala

March 31 – April 3

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Freedom of expression and the right to inform continue to come under attack and pressure from government officials and from others with ties to the government.

The open hostility in government circles toward the independent media has gone to such extremes that Mario Meléndez, the mayor of Villa de Panchimalco and a member of the ruling party, said at a public event attended by President Salvador Sánchez Cerén that the media throw "feces" at their audiences every day.

There have also been encouraging signs. A court in Santa Tecla ordered Andrés Ortiz Lara, José Navarro, Mayra Lisseth Morán, Óscar Domínguez, and Sofía Medina, communications officer for the mayor of San Salvador, to face a public trial for the cyberattack on La Prensa Gráfica. For procedural reasons, the court did not include the charges against the same group of individuals in connection with the cyberattacks on El Diario de Hoy.

At the hearing, the judge did not explicitly identify defendant "N" as Nayib Bukele, but he did rule that "N" should also be tried for giving the orders to the other members of the group.

To open the trial, the judge relied on three technical reports submitted by the United States Justice Department, as well as reports submitted by local experts at the behest of the Office of the Attorney General.

These reports show how two of the defendants purchased foreign internet domains — using credit cards to pay for them — to then clone and discredit the websites of www.laprensagrafica.com and www.elsalvador.com.

In another noteworthy development in this period, the Democracy, Transparency and Justice Foundation and the El Salvador Journalists Association have proposed passage of a Journalism Protection Act and the creation of a protective entity that would bring together organizations and universities that work in human rights, journalism, and communication.

Other significant developments in this period:

Cristian Meléndez, a journalist with La Prensa Gráfica, received death threats posted on a Facebook account under the name Sociedad Civil (Civil Society), an organization that is friendly to the government and hostile toward journalism critical of the government. Meléndez filed a complaint with the attorney general's office, claiming that the reprisals came after he published his investigative work on the San Salvador mayoral office and on weaponry missing from the Armed Forces.

Mayor Nayib Bukele drew a connection between the killing of six people in downtown San Salvador to a report published by La Prensa Gráfica. The media stoked the controversy by discrediting the media outlet in a maneuver aimed at concealing the lack of public safety. That area of the city endures four homicides per day, and merchants are victims of extortion by gangs.

The mayor threatened to bring a defamation claim against La Prensa Gráfica for raising questions about a multimillion-dollar project to implement a video surveillance system. He said the newspaper "damaged the honor, morale, and integrity" of the city council members who voted for the project.

On that occasion, the mayor ordered that journalists from El Diario de Hoy be barred from entering a press conference called to announce the measure. The city council subsequently said the project was being abandoned.

Four gang members were sentenced to 20 years in prison in connection with the murder of Nicolás García Silvestre on March 10, 2016. García Silvestre was a host on the community radio station Expresa, in Tacuba, department of Ahuachapán. He hosted the program "Voces al aire" (Voices on the Air) on the topic of violence prevention.

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