Carlos Martínez García, a journalist with the national newspaper "La Jornada", was granted protective measures after he received a threat on the night of 30 April 2009 in Mexico City, after citing a website address in two of his articles.
(CENCOS/IFEX) – Carlos Martínez García, a journalist with the national newspaper “La Jornada”, was granted protective measures after he received a threat on the night of 30 April 2009 in Mexico City, after citing a website address in two of his articles.
At approximately 8:30 p.m. (local time) on 30 April, the journalist and his wife were driving in the southern part of the city when they heard a youth on a highway yell at Martínez: “if you don’t stop using the jimdo website, something bad will happen.”
In an interview with CENCOS, Martínez mentions that the only reference he made to the jimdo blog ( http://losperfectos.jimdo.com/ ) was in his two most recent articles for “La Jornada” and “Protestante Digital de España”, where he had used information from the blog, which is dedicated to compiling statistics on children who have gone missing from the Casitas del Sur orphanage and their alleged connection to the Iglesia Cristiana Restaurada religious movement. He said the threats come from a group that is annoyed by the existence of the jimdo site and want it to be removed from the Internet. He added that he does not know the people who run and maintain the site.
Concerned for his safety and that of his family, Martínez turned to the Mexico City Human Rights Commission (Comisión de Derechos Humano del Distrito Federal, CDHDF) for support. On 8 May the CDHDF succeeded in its request that protective measures be set in place.
CENCOS calls on the Mexican government to monitor the case because according to section 2 of the IACHR declaration on the principles of free expression, which Mexico has signed, all people have the right to freely look for, receive and distribute information and opinions.
