Posts Tagged ‘Honduras’
May 27th, 2011
Three gunmen
killed Channel 24 television owner Luis Ernesto Mendoza Cerrato last week. Gunmen also
wounded newspaper manager Manuel Acosta Medina two days as he drove home. According to the
Committee to Protect Journalists, 11 journalists have been killed in Honduras since March 2010, at least three weer murdered in retaliation for their work. Although police are investigating whether the two crimes were assassinations, a CPJ report in 2010 found consistently poor and negligent investigative work into the killings.
March 17th, 2011
The board president of a Honduran radio station was
shot in the leg on 13 March by two people who disagreed with his editorial policies. He was hospitalised but his condition has been described as “stable”. Franklin Melendez is the president of the board of community radio station La Voz de Zacate Grande, which has been targeted for supporting local peasant groups in a land dispute.
It is claimed that the identity of his attackers is known, but neither the police or the judicial authorities have taken any action in response. The police asked the station “not to make a fuss”.
September 17th, 2010
On 14 September Luis Galdámez, a radio journalist working for Radio Globo in Honduras, was
targeted by unidentified assassins. He was ambushed as he returned home from work with his children in the car. However he and his son were able to
repel the gunmen using the firearms they had bought after a similar attempt on his life was made in 2005. He is widely known for his
criticism of the new government of President Porfirio Lobo, and regularly reports on government corruption and human rights abuses allegedly committed by law enforcement.
Eight journalists have been killed since March in Honduras.
June 8th, 2010
La Voz de Zacate Grande, a community radio station
was closed down by 300 soldiers and police officers, on 3 June. The station which began broadcasting on 14 April, defends the cause of the Association for the Development of the Zacate Grande Peninsula (ADEPZA), whose representatives are accused by agro-industrial tycoon Miguel Facussé Barjum of occupying “his“ land and “tax fraud. Yellow tape bearing with the words “crime scene” now surrounds the small station.
May 24th, 2010
On May 12, the Honduran supreme court ratified its earliar decision
to dismiss four lower-court judges who are members of Judges for Democracy, a group that has challenged the legality of the coup that ousted President Manuel Zelaya last year. Two of the judges, including the president of the group, were removed for participating in public demonstrations calling for Zelaya to be reinstated. The judges have started an indefinite
hunger strike as a protest.
April 28th, 2010
International human rights monitors are to
investigate the murders of journalists in Honduras. Since the beginning of March,
seven reporters have been shot dead in the country. A delegation from the
Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will travel to Honduras in May to determine whether the murders were related to their work. There have been suggestions that the killings may be
connected to organised crime in the country.
April 22nd, 2010
Georgino Orellana, a producer and presenter for
Television de Honduras, is the seventh journalist to be murdered in Honduras in the past six weeks. Orellana had just left the station’s studios in San Pedro Sula last night, when he was shot dead by an unidentified person. The motive is still unknown but police chief
Hector Ivan Mejia insists that this murder “won’t go unpunished.” Honduras has been the world’s deadliest country for the media since the start of this year and, although the criminal violence across the country had always been high, the coup significantly implemented the plight of journalists.
April 14th, 2010
On 12 April, a court
dropped all the charges against the former commissioners of the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL), accused of the
closure of two media during the political crisis of 2009. The Human Rights special prosecutor had accused them of the crime of abuse of authority, for ordering the closing of
Channel 36 and Radio Globo, in the context of the
political crisis created after the coup d’état against Manuel Zelaya.
