IAPA: Criminal Violence, Hostile Governments Are Muzzling Hemisphere's Press

By: Mark Fitzgerald Organized crime, unpunished assassinations of journalists, and an increasing number of national leaders hostile to the press are muzzling freedom of expression throughout the hemisphere, the Inter American Press Association declared Tuesday.

In a concluding statement for its annual meeting, IAPA accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as committing the "worst abuses" against press freedom in the six months since the group last met. IAPA condemned Chavez specifically for closing the independent Radio Caracas Television station, and confiscating its 48 repeater stations and transmitters to establish a government-run channel.

IAPA noted that in the last six months nine journalists -- including Oakland (Calif.) Post Editor Chauncey Bailey -- were murdered because of their work. Three circulation workers for a newspaper in Oaxaca, Mexico, were also slaughtered, apparently by a local drug trafficking gang angered by the paper's reporting.

"There are still obstacles to freedom of the press, of information, and of expression in many hemispheric countries," said the statement adopted at the General Assembly. "Journalists experience physical and psychological violence, government harassment, and all kinds of legal attacks that induce them to censor themselves."

IAPA singled out Mexico as a nation where killers of journalists are able to act with near-complete impunity.

The Miami-based press freedom group also expressed alarm at the growing practice of using the allocation of government advertising to punish or reward newspapers. "The governments of Argentina, Aruba, Ecuador, Guyana, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela all use government advertising as a way to pressure the media," it said.

The IAPA declaration also condemned Cuba, where it notes that 27 independent journalists remain in jail because of their work, several of them "gravely ill."

"The situation in Cuba is still alarming after 48 years of dictatorship with no signs of a democratic transition," IAPA said.