(PROBIDAD/IFEX) – Municipal authorities’ aggressiveness with Radio Progreso station staff and its director, Jesuit priest Ismael Moreno, intensified on 14 December 2006, when Moreno was warned to “watch out and stop talking shit,” station personnel reported to the Committee for Free Expression (Comité por la Libre Expresión, C-Libre). On 14 December, staff of the station, […]
(PROBIDAD/IFEX) – Municipal authorities’ aggressiveness with Radio Progreso station staff and its director, Jesuit priest Ismael Moreno, intensified on 14 December 2006, when Moreno was warned to “watch out and stop talking shit,” station personnel reported to the Committee for Free Expression (Comité por la Libre Expresión, C-Libre).
On 14 December, staff of the station, which is located in the northern city of El Progreso, in Yoro department, went to city hall to ask for police assistance for the festivities to be held on 16 December on the station’s 50th anniversary.
However, town councillor Otto Sorto, a Liberal party member, irritated by an opinion expressed by the station, asked station representatives how they dared make such a request, “if the radio station only talks shit about the mayor and the municipal administration.”
Sorto also said, “Tell that priest to stop talking shit, that he’d better watch out, because something could happen to him,” Moreno reported to C-Libre.
In October 2006, journalist José Peraza was assaulted and threatened by municipal employees angered because he asked municipal employee Jorge Alemán, during an interview, about his state of drunkenness when he had presented the municipal budget. Municipal employee Lucy Padilla, present during the interview, then physically attacked the journalist, hurled obscenities at him and grabbed away his microphone. The municipal police had to be called in to assist the journalist.
When the assault on Peraza became public knowledge, the municipality fired Alemán. However, he was later reinstated, due to pressure from the Congress, and on condition he not get drunk again. Since Alemán’s return, Radio Progreso journalists, especially José Peraza, have been threatened and denied access to information. According to station reporters, the acts of intimidation are ongoing and on several occasions Peraza has been followed by people he does not recognise.
According to Fr. Moreno, who also directs the Honduran Jesuit community’s Centre for Research, Reflection and Communication (Centro de Investigación, Reflexión y Comunicación), “The issue of freedom of expression is becoming more and more sensitive in this city; it appears that impunity may prevail over justice and reason.”
This alert was prepared by PROBIDAD with information provided by the C-Libre.
