The international community is signing a letter in which the Honduran government is called upon to put an end to the reigning climate of terror and to identify and apply the full weight of the law to the guilty.
(IAPA/IFEX) – MIAMI, Florida – April 26, 2010 – Hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers throughout the Americas were invited today by the Inter American Press Association (IAPA) to sign a letter addressed to the president of Honduras, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, asking him to set up legal mechanisms enabling violence unleashed against journalists and the impunity surrounding such offenses to be confronted and ended.
Since the beginning of last month to date six journalists have been murdered in various parts of the Central American country – José Hernández (killed on March 1), David Meza (March 11), Nahúm Palacios (March 14), José Bayardo Mairena and Manuel Juárez (March 26), and Georgino Orellano (April 20) – setting off a wave of violence without any positive result in the police investigations.
The international community is signing a letter, published by the IAPA in nearly 400 newspapers around the Western Hemisphere, in which the Honduran government is called upon to put an end to the reigning climate of terror and to identify and apply the full weight of the law to the guilty.
“We take the liberty of calling your attention to these cases, urging you to please instruct your country’s relevant authorities not to cease their respective investigations and not to allow these murders to go unpunished,” the letter adds.
The IAPA is waging a hemisphere-wide campaign titled “Let’s Put an End to Impunity” so that more than 380 crimes committed against journalists – and the disappearances of a dozen others – in the last 22 years may not remain unpunished. The initiative is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.