Eleana Borjas and Claudia Mendoza say they were dismissed because they disagreed with the magazine's new editorial mandate.
(C-Libre/IFEX) – Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 6 November 2011 – Journalist Eleana Borjas reports that she was dismissed from her position at Revistazo.com on 27 October 2011 after she disagreed with the magazine’s editorial line. Borjas also believes she was fired because of her support for Claudia Mendoza, the online magazine’s former coordinator who was fired on 15 August.
“We do not have the freedom to publish,” says Borjas. “Recently I told [the board of directors] that I had an article about the country’s mining problem and they told me that I couldn’t publish it because the topic was outside of the magazine’s editorial mandate, even though several months ago it was acceptable.”
Borjas told C-Libre that her dismissal is a violation of freedom of expression because she said that she was not in favour of the magazine’s new editorial policy. In a meeting several weeks before her dismissal, Borjas said that she was told that she had better change her attitude or else the board would hire someone else to do her job.
Mendoza, the magazine’s former coordinator, said, “They fired me on 15 August, but six months prior they called me into a meeting and demanded more ‘objectivity’ in reporting the news. They told me that because I had told my reporters to cover news about resistance protesters being attacked, then I had to tell them to cover news of police officers being attacked too.”
Mendoza asked, “Was it objective that we called the events of 28 June a coup d’etat while the commercial press called it constitutional succession? Was it objective that we published reports of people who were attacked and injured, women who were raped and protesters who were killed, while the mainstream press shamelessly avoided what was happening? What kind of objectivity are we expecting to talk about?”
Under Mendoza’s direction, Revistazo.com’s mandate was to shed light on topics that the traditional media does not address, such as repression of local communities as a result of land appropriation claims by powerful interests in Honduras, human rights and labour rights violations by fast-food companies, and the subsidies awarded by congressional deputies without appropriate oversight.
(Please note this is an abridged translation.)
