Journalism Groups Denounce Attacks on Guatemalan Reporters

By: Journalism watchdog groups on Thursday condemned recent attacks on members of the Guatemalan press -- including attempted murder -- and urged the Central American country to investigate and prosecute the crimes.

The Miami-based Inter American Press Association first reported the shooting Wednesday of Radio 10 host Vinicio Aguilar Mancilla, who was wounded in the face and hands by two men on a motorcycle as he was about to go jogging with friends in Guatemala City. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was in stable condition Thursday.

Aguilar said he did not know the reason for the attack, Gonzalo Marroquin, IAPA's head of the Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, said in a statement.

The radio station has been threatened repeatedly for reporting on a tax evasion lawsuit involving Avicola Villalobos, one of Central America's largest agricultural conglomerates and an economic boycott was also launched against the station, station director Oscar Rodolfo Castaneda said in a statement by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

On Tuesday, an on-air caller warned Castaneda would be killed if he did not leave the country within eight days, the statement said. The committee expressed concern about the violent attacks and urged authorities to conduct a thorough investigation.

Marroquin, editor of Prensa Libre, one of Guatemala's largest newspapers, called on the country's Attorney General's Office "to investigate as a matter of urgency the incidents that have occurred this week involving journalists." Officials at the Guatemalan Ministry of Foreign Relations had no immediate comment.

In a separate case, four journalists in Guatemala's historic tourist town of Antigua reported receiving threats in an apparent reprisal after accusing the local mayor and his administration of misconduct.

One of journalists, Prensa Libre correspondent Maria Teresa Lope Lima, said the mayor's brother-in-law, a military police captain, had been keeping detailed files on her. Lopez said she'd seen the file, which contained photographs, personal details and a list of her telephone calls. She said she was told the investigation was connected to her coverage of the mayor.

The other three journalists, Merida Reynosa, Palomo Cajas and Flores Sosa, and their family members also received telephone threats after alleging the mayor's involvement in corruption, the IAPA reported.

On August 11, four television and two newspaper reporters were threatened and held for more than three hours by groups of armed peasants in Senahu in the northern Guatemalan province of Alta Verapaz, the scene of an ongoing labor and land dispute.

Guatemalan journalist Julie Lopez, who coordinates Florida International University's master's program in Spanish-language meda, said she was particularly concerned about members of the press working in the country's rural regions, whose cases are less likely to receive international attention.

"Someone who attacks journalists and receives no punishment is basically getting a license to attack again," she said.

Attacks against Guatemalan journalists increased prior to the presidential elections in 2003, with roughly 20 suffering threats or attacks, making the country the most dangerous for journalists in Latin America, said Carlos Lauria, who heads the Americas program for the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. Lauria said that in recent years the situation had improved somewhat.