(PROBIDAD/IFEX) – On 12 October 2006, radio station Radio Progreso – owned by Honduras’s Jesuit Community, a Roman Catholic religious order – reported an assault on its journalist, José Antonio Peraza, by a municipal employee irritated because the reporter had asked, in an interview with town administrator Jorge Alemán, while attempting to interview him, about […]
(PROBIDAD/IFEX) – On 12 October 2006, radio station Radio Progreso – owned by Honduras’s Jesuit Community, a Roman Catholic religious order – reported an assault on its journalist, José Antonio Peraza, by a municipal employee irritated because the reporter had asked, in an interview with town administrator Jorge Alemán, while attempting to interview him, about Alemán’s inebriated state during a discussion of the municipal budget.
“Why do you go around in this drunken condition while working?” Peraza had asked Alemán, during an interview he had scheduled with Alemán on 11 October, regarding budget expenditures in the city of El Progreso, in Yoro department, northern Honduras, where Hondura’s Jesuits’ headquarters is located.
In reaction to the question, municipal employee Lucy Padilla hurled a stream of insults and obscenities at the reporter, then threw herself on top of him and snatched away his microphone. The municipal police had to be called in to rescue the journalist from the town hall.
In a protest statement sent to the Committee for Free Expression (Comité por la Libre Expresión, C-Libre), Radio Progreso representatives posed the question, “Why is municipal employee Lucy Padilla so determined, and even willing to resort to violence and threats, to hide the fact that the town’s administrator is working and handling taxpayers’ money while he’s completely drunk?”
The Honduran Jesuit Community’s superior, Ismail Moreno, indicated that Padilla even threatened to bar the reporter from the municipality’s offices, in order to prevent him from exercising his right to information and freedom of expression.
Moreno added, “Radio Progreso condemns these incidents before the various bodies defending freedom of expression and human rights, and demands that the National Commissioner for Human Rights investigate this attack on our media outlet and on our reporter, Peraza.”
This is the second incident in two weeks in which a journalist working far from the capital has been attacked by municipal officials. The other incident involved an assault on Elder Martínez, a correspondent for the Tegucigalpa-based radio station HRN in La Virtud, Lempira department, in western Honduras near the Salvadorean border (see IFEX alert of 12 October 2006).
As well, C-Libre has also received information regarding incidents affecting at least five other journalists, working in Tegucigalpa, who have been assaulted or otherwise mistreated by authorities at the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Security, or the Presidential Guard.
This alert was prepared by PROBIDAD with information provided by C-Libre.
